Seumas Milne in the Guardian accuses British journalists of “a wilful and dangerous refusal to face up to reality” in an article entitled It is an insult to the dead to deny the link with Iraq
He’s talking about the London bombings of course and attempting to divine the root causes and rationales why people might decide to maim and kill dozens of innocent London public transport users:
No surprises what reasons he discovers in his crystal ball:
“We can be certain that the bloodbath unleashed by Bush and Blair in Iraq – where a 7/7 takes place every day – was at the very least one of them”
Back to Iraq, of course. And Milne knows who should share the blame for last Thursday’s carnage.
the prime minister – who was warned by British intelligence of the risks in the run-up to the war – is also responsible for knowingly putting his own people at risk in the service of a foreign power.
Our man at the Guardian also knows the best way of preventing further bombings:
The security crackdowns and campaign to uproot an “evil ideology” the government announced yesterday will not extinguish the threat. Only a British commitment to end its role in the bloody occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is likely to do that.
That’s the official Stopper line in a nutshell. Everything was fine until Iraq and the only way to remove ourselves from the Islamist crosshairs is to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible.
Well, Guardian journalists are entitled to their opinions but they should be called to account when their arguments aren’t supported by any evidence. Or directly contradicted by more compelling evidence.
I have no idea whether Iraq was one of the motivations for the bombings and the only people who do know don’t exist anymore so we’ll have to look somewhere else to test the strength of Milne’s blithe assertion that Londoners would be safer if we drew our horns in and allowed medieval theocrats and bloodstained tyrants to flourish in the middle east.
A good place to start might be in an American military jail. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed used to be a high ranking Al Qaeda operations chief until he was picked up in Pakistan in early 2003.
He admitted here that Al-Qaeda terrorists were sent from Pakistan and Afghanistan to work on what he called “the Heathrow operation” soon after the attacks on America in September 2001. His words have been cross-checked with the confessions of other senior Al-Qaeda prisoners.
Key words:
Heathrow
“soon after the attacks on America in September 2001”
The invasion of Iraq was March 2003. Even the campaign to remove the Taliban didn’t begin until Autumn 2001.
So in a nutshell we have the corroborated words of a whole division of highranking Islamist ‘militants’ who admitted that London’s biggest airport was targetted for a spectacular in 2001 against the unsupported musings in the Guardian that Iraq must be behind every evil in the world.
Take your pick about who is failing to face up to reality people.
Update: Damn, I see David T sneaked in his Milne bashing ten minutes before me.