Cause & effect, Mr Bush & Blair: US troops next to Mecca were the reason for 9/11. Now it's your troops in Iraq

Two views from the Toronto Star:

1. A Few Obscenities for Blair and Company to Chew On by Gwynne Dyer

Let's talk dirty. The 9/11 suicide hijackers — all Arabs — attacked the U.S. instead of Brazil or Japan because the U.S. government has been neck-deep in the politics of the Arab world for a generation, whereas the Brazilian and Japanese governments haven't. There is a connection between Washington's Mideast policies — its support for oppressive Arab regimes, its military interventions in the region, and its uncritical backing for Israeli government policies — and the fact that Americans have become the preferred targets for Islamist terrorist attacks.

Indeed, no other non-Muslim nation except Israel was a target for Islamist terrorist attacks until after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And the attacks since then have been aimed at the citizens of countries that were complicit in that invasion: Londoners, not Parisians; Spaniards, not Germans; Australians holidaying in Bali, not Japanese holidaying in Malaysia.

There you have it: two full paragraphs of obscenity. Prime Minister Tony Blair himself says so. He informed us last Tuesday that any attempt to link the terrorist attacks in London to his decision to follow the Bush administration in invading Iraq was "an obscenity." That's nonsense. All the comments in the first two paragraphs of this article are about cause and effect. You may agree or disagree with the analysis, but discussions of cause and effect are still permissible and even necessary. So how does Blair — and President George W. Bush in Washington, and Prime Minister John Howard in Canberra — get away with forbidding us to talk about what is causing all this?

The key technique is to claim that any attempt to explain why these attacks are happening is also an attempt to condone and justify them. Blair gave a virtuoso demonstration of the technique in his press conference Tuesday. What he said was, "It is time we stopped saying: `Okay, we abhor (Al Qaeda's) methods but we kind of see something in their ideas or they have a sliver of an excuse or a justification for it.' They have no justification for it. Neither do they have any justification for killing people in Israel. Let's just get that out of the way as well. There is no justification for suicide bombing in Palestine, in Iraq, in London, in Egypt, in Turkey, anywhere."

Nobody had actually said suicide bombings are justified. What they are saying, in increasing numbers, is that actions have consequences, and that the reason a few young British Muslims became suicide bombers in 2005, whereas none at all became suicide bombers in 2000, is precisely the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency pointed out recently, the invasion of Iraq has turned the country into a breeding ground for a new generation of Arab jihadis in the Middle East.

What it failed to add was that it has also spread the virus of Islamist terrorism into Muslim communities in Western countries that previously contained only a few fanatics. Until Iraq, none of them contained people so filled with rage and so convinced that they were involved in a holy war that they were willing to blow themselves and dozens of strangers up. The problem is that the invasion of Iraq made it look (to those already susceptible to such extreme arguments) as if the Islamist extremists, who had barely any credibility outside the Arab world even 10 years ago, were right. If there were no terrorists in Iraq, why did Western countries invade it? Because there is a Judeo-Christian conspiracy to destroy Islam, stupid. If there is another terrorist attack in the U.S., it is likely to come from within the resident Muslim community, as it has in Britain.

Most American Muslims, like most British Muslims, are appalled by the radical doctrines that are sweeping some of their young men and women away. But it is self-serving nonsense on the part of the governments of these countries to pretend that this is just some inexplicable outburst of violence by weird Muslim people. The laws of cause and effect still rule.

2. Terror Attacks are Response to Military Actions by Linda McQuaig

In the official, mainstream view of terrorism — the view trumpeted by western governments, think tanks and media commentators — terrorists are freedom-loathing zealots with an irrational hatred of our western lifestyle and culture.

But another view, polls suggest, is gaining ground with the public: Terrorism is actually a response to military interventions perpetrated by western governments.

These sharply diverging views are central to the question of how to deal with terrorism. Under the "irrational hatred" view, there's not much we can do other than ratchet up our security and hunker down for a long fight with a bunch of lunatics.

But under the second theory, some solutions may be possible. At least, it suggests we should carefully scrutinize what actions our governments are up to in the Middle East, to assess whether these actions are justified and, if not, to stop them. After all, if the actions aren't justified, we should stop them anyway. Right? Or should we continue to act unjustly — if that's what we're doing — simply so we can look firm in our opposition to terrorism?

The U.S. and British governments fear such public scrutiny of their actions in the Middle East. This isn't surprising, since any serious analysis would reveal a history of Anglo-American interventions that could best be described as imperialistic.

All this has implications for Canada. Under the "irrational hatred" theory, terrorists are just as likely to strike Toronto as New York or London, since we also enjoy an indulgent western lifestyle here in Toronto.

But under the second — and more plausible — theory, terrorists are less likely to strike in Canada, given our more limited role in interventions in the Middle East. We're supporting the U.S. in Afghanistan, but we've stayed out of the more provocative U.S. occupation of Iraq.

One of the few systematic studies of terrorism provides evidence that refutes the "irrational hatred" theory.

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, has put together a comprehensive data bank of every suicide terrorist attack (315) in the world since 1980.

"(W)hat nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common," notes Pape in his book, Dying to Win, "is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland." Pape also observes that once a military occupation ends, the suicide terrorism tends to stop.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair went to great lengths last week to suggest that the recent London bombings weren't connected to Britain's role in the occupation of Iraq, but rather to irrational hatred of western culture.

Really?

If you attack your neighbour, kill several of his family members, ransack his house and steal his car, is it logical to conclude that your neighbour is in a rage against you because he doesn't like how you dress and what movies you enjoy watching?