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Thursday, July 05, 2007

The high price of 'intervention'

"It's perfectly true that al-Qaida and its "takfiri" fellow travellers have an extreme, violently sectarian and socially conservative ideology. But it is simply delusional - and flies in the face of logic and history - to fail to recognise the central link between the terror threat and Britain's post-9/11 actions in the Muslim world.
First, there were no al-Qaida-inspired attacks in Britain before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. There were against the US - starting with the World Trade Centre in 1993 - triggered by the aftermath of the Gulf war, as well as jihadist campaigns in Kashmir, Chechnya and Bosnia. But Britain was not a target until it attacked the Muslim world. If the bombers' real focus was, say, sexually liberal western lifestyles, they would presumably be attacking cities like Amsterdam and Stockholm."


You can read the rest of Seumas Milne's excellent piece on how adopting an 'interventionist' neo-conservative foreign policy has made Britain a target for terrorists here.

UPDATE: There's some more fine analysis on this issue from Rod Liddle in the latest edition of The Spectator.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The neo-conservative warmongers stirred up a hornet's nest. But its not them that's getting stung, just ordinary people. When's the last time Tony Blair went to a disco in Haymarket or took a passenger flight from Glasgow airport?