Originally posted at Grok Your World. Part of a 19-part series, which also includes:
Finally, before leaving the London bombings for at least a short while, there remains one key point that MUST be made: how those outrages have utterly destroyed the last remaining rationale proffered by the Bush regime for its insane and, seemingly, doomed-to-failure invasion and occupation of Iraq.
As everyone knows, BushCo has run through a whole series of fake justifications for Iraq – from non-existent weapons of mass destruction possessed by Saddam Hussein, through his non-existent collaboration with the political Islamists who did 9/11,
then the moral imperative of bringing “democracy” to the Middle East – without ever explaining why Iraq was more important in this regard than, say, Saudi Arabia – to, finally, “fighting the terrorists there, so we won’t have to fight them here.”
All of these have betrayed massive and willful ignorance of what’s actually going on in the Arab / Muslim world in general, and Iraq in particular, but this last one was particularly egregious – and, we hope, utterly de-legitimated by the fact of the London bombings.
However emotionally comforting such a ridiculous notion may have been to people who were completely ignorant of what 9/11 had revealed about political Islam, it was always easily eviscerated with a simple rejoinder:
“Oh, so you think that there are only, say, 30 to 40 Islamist terrorists in the Muslim world, and they’re going to make it easier for us to destroy them forever by going to Iraq, where we can get them all in one fell swoop ???”
This nonsensical notion rested on the insulting assumption that the Islamists would be irresistibly drawn to Iraq, like moths to the flame, by the chance to kill Americans - without realizing that, however many might be intriguted by that possibility,
a) the Americans in Iraq were actually well-armed, and able to fight back; and b) there were, and still are, plenty of Americans back in America, not to mention the rest of the world, somewhat less well-armed, who remained juicy targets for those interested in such sport.
So however easily such a hare-brained view of the situation could be exposed BEFORE London, AFTER London it has now fallen by the wayside like all the other rationales.
Put bluntly, Britain has sent plenty of soldiers to fight in Iraq … yet, somehow, there clearly remained enough terrorists – wherever they were based, including Britain itself – to pull off a truly horrific operation like 7/7.
So, if it does nothing else, London has destroyed forever the simplistic idea that the whole confrontation with political Islam can be solved by the invasion of a Middle Eastern country that, until the US invasion, had actually SUPPRESSED political Islam.
Which means the self-serving American idea that the issues raised by 9/11 could be solved in Iraq –
with no great inconvenience for Americans, and, for Bush, without having to confront political Islam on the level of VALUES – the ONLY level on which it can be decisively defeated –
now lies shattered in the dark recesses of the London tube, the one thing buried there that should NEVER be resuscitated and brought again to light.
