Gwynne Dyer: Bombs had nothing to do with anything

It's official. The four suicide bombs that killed more than 50 people in London had nothing to do with anything. The family and friends of the young men who committed the atrocity, all British-born Muslims of Pakistani descent, insisted that their actions had nothing to do with Islam.

Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, the only major British party to condemn the invasion of Iraq in May's election, cautiously said: "I am not here implying some causal link between Britain's involvement in Iraq and the attacks in London."

Prime Minister Tony Blair's spokesman said it would be "naive" to link the London bombs and the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

"This kind of terrorism was active long before the Iraq war," he said. "9/11 was in September 2001, not 2003."

So there you have it. The September 11 attacks, in which 19 men born in the Middle East killed several thousand innocent people in America, were just a random act by people who "hate freedom," and the target could just as easily have been Canada or Sweden.

The explosions in London on July 7, in which four young British men brought up in West Yorkshire murdered dozens of their fellow countrymen, could just as easily have happened 10 years ago.

And, of course, none of it had anything to do with Islam.

We are drowning in lies. The United States Government, whose troops, intelligence services and proxies have spent the past 50 years subverting or crushing Middle East Governments - including democratic ones - that threatened its control of the region's oil, denies that the wave of terrorist attacks has anything to do with US policy.

But here's a clue. Arabs make up less than a quarter of the world's Muslims, but all 19 hijackers on September 11 - like almost every other Islamist radical that attacked any American target before the invasion of Iraq - were Arabs.

The British Government similarly denies that there is any connection between Tony Blair's decision to join President Bush's Iraq adventure and the bombs in London. Blair has to defend this position regardless of the evidence, because otherwise it would be solely his fault that Britain is now a target for Islamist terrorism.
But here's another clue. Every major terrorist attack by Islamists since the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, has targeted the citizens of countries that sent troops to Iraq: Americans, not Canadians; British, not French; Spanish, not Germans; Australians, not purposely New Zealanders. And these later attacks have not all been carried out by Arabs.

As well, other Muslims are now getting involved: Indonesians in the bomb attack on Australian tourists in Bali; Turks in the attacks on the British consulate and Jewish institutions in Istanbul; and now British Muslims of non-Arab origin in attacks on their own fellow citizens in London.

Is there some "causal link" here, as Charles Kennedy so delicately put it? You bet your boots there is.

Muslims everywhere were horrified by September 11, and quite rightly denied that it was in any way an expression of Islamic values.

But many Arabs did share the grievances that had radicalised the terrorists, and even felt a fleeting, guilty satisfaction at seeing Americans suffer as so many Arabs have suffered, whereas most non-Arab Muslims - at that point - saw no excuse whatever for the attacks and felt nothing but sympathy for the US.

That sympathy persisted right through the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, which most non-Arab Muslims still saw as a justifiable response to the September 11 attacks.

After all, there actually were terrorist training camps in Afghanistan run by members of al Qaeda, most of them Arabs, who were doing their best to spread their apocalyptic version of revolutionary Islam beyond the confines of the Arab world.

But they really weren't having much success, although there were some non-Arab Muslims in the training camps in Afghanistan.

Then came the invasion of Iraq, which was obviously not about fighting terrorism (since there weren't any terrorists there, or any links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda).

All over the world, Muslims, particularly young Muslims, began to conclude that there was some substance to the Islamist radicals' argument that the West was indiscriminately attacking Muslims everywhere; that it was actually attacking Islam itself.

That is not true.

The Iraq operation was really just the Bush Administration exploiting the panic about terrorism to pursue quite traditional strategic objectives in the Middle East.

But this was the point at which terrorist attacks by non-Arab Muslims living in Western countries first became a serious possibility, because the entire Muslim communities in countries that included Britain, the US and Australia felt betrayed by their own Governments.

Only the tiniest minority of their young men and women are ever likely to respond to that sense of betrayal with actual terrorist attacks, but the connection between Britain's participation in the invasion of Iraq and the bombs in London is strong.

None of the Western countries that drew the line at an unprovoked invasion of Iraq - not even France, Germany and Canada, which sent troops to help the US fight terrorism in Afghanistan, and that have large Muslim minorities at home - have seen such an attack, and probably won't.

Actions do have consequences.

* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.