The Other War

It seems the London bombers were angry about events in Iraq - is anyone really surprised by this? Our governments lie to us, lead us into a criminal war that kills tens of thousands, destroying international alliances and treaties like the Geneva Convention in the process, then they relentlessly barrage us with propaganda to back up their lies... and we are supposed to just "move on"?

There is another war here, and that is the war against our Western Democracies.

I am not saying the London bombers were right to use violence, not at all. Of course not. But violence begets violence, and this sort of thing is really quite inevitable under the circumstances. Al Quaeda's philosophy of anti-Western violence has gained untold recruits across the Muslim world since Bush's misguided reaction to 9/11, so is it really any surprise that the recruits are now beginning to come from within our own Western societies?

Here in Australia, our government came down like a ton of bricks on the Police Commissioner's head last year when he suggested that (quite obviously) our involvement in Iraq made us more of a terrorist target. Now our government responds to the London bombings by warning (with no supporting evidence) that there is a chance that terrorists could be "home-grown" here as easily as in the UK. How do you square that circle? The hypocrisy, the lack of logical coherence, the moral bankruptcy of our own governments... these are our greatest weakness.

Just as in the Plame case, where Karl Rove was all too happy to sacrifice the cover of a CIA specialist in WMDs for the sake of personal political gain, so more broadly our governments are clearly manipulating this whole "War On *Ahem!*" for abjectly hypocritical and damnably short-term political and economic advantages. Blind Freddy can see, if he cares to do so, that our own governments are feeding us endless lies to protect themselves from exposure of the original lies that led us into this unwarranted war. In the process, they are making us all less safe, not more.

So, like Raed (see below), we are caught in the middle. Not between East and West, but between the violence of real terrorists and the dangerous lies of our own morally bankrupt governments.

Is it any coincidence that - in the USA and Australia particularly - our current governments have sided with Big Business on so many other policy issues, to the point that we are now edging towards Fascism?

My government has become my enemy, as surely as any foreign terrorist. My government shames me, does not protect me, and most certainly does not represent me in any way, shape or form.

But how do I explain that to a suicide bomber on my way to work next week?