bomb alerts and stuff

Wait, let me get this straight, because we had 7/7 we need to learn from... the country that had 9/11?

CONFRONTED with...inconvenience...ethnic minorities...are clearly the main threat...police atrocities...at their height...is in the overwhelming interests of the entire community, irrespective of...terrorism...Nothing could do more harm to race relations in this country than...completely innocent and decent Asians...suspicion and distrust...is a natural and human reaction...the dangers in...police instruction...have already been demonstrated and again those people of minority ethnic origin who are living here as legal British citizens...is a growing problem and is also causing enormous resentment and damaging good race relations.

Although Britain is...simple...catching the terrorists...will involve...inconvenience.

9/11 and the previous WTC bomb demonstrated that terrorists were clearly starting to take it to the source...but considering tube bombs could've happened at any time before or after 9/11 i don't think the UK was considered such a 'worthy target' until the Iraq occupation/it's aftermath (being the final straw) - one of the bombers having already effectively confirmed this (unless of course you assert that he is fibbing).

So the general 'no Iraq intervention = no London bombs' point still holds AS MUCH currency as the denial as this - you can't be any more sure of one than the other really, but to call it as to see it etc.

Are you getting your ideology straight from Jack Straw?

momus, fuck off, are you getting yours from saddam hussein?

didn't these all follow the Afghanistan occupation though? (forgot to throw Afghanistan in with Iraq). Not that I'm condemning the way in which the situation with the Taliban was handled.

Interesting!

momus in populism shock!

xpost

surely the question is not 'are they linked?' but 'how relevant is the obvious linkage wrt how Blair has handled Iraq situation?'

xp exactly stevem.

Yes, I was just thinking, it's probably in the 80s now, after Osman's explicit statement from Rome.

If you really want to know what caused Hitler, then it was the shooting of Franz Ferdinand, because otherwise there would have been no WWI and Hitler would in all probability have expired as a penniless wino in the gutters of Vienna, which he was on the road to doing before being called up.

You should write to the Guardian - I hear they're looking for a replacement for Aaronovitch.

xpost

In other words, why do you want 7/7 to be a question of the personal responsibility of terrorists, but not a question of the personal responsibility of politicians?

this isn't entirely whati think, given i have said that the ubjective motivation of the individual bombers isn't very important. but atthe same time the people who set off the bombs are more respobnsible than the politicians who failed to stop them!

in your paragraph there's an 'is' part and an 'ought' part. i disagree that by asserting that 'is' i am somehow like jack straw. but i disagree with most of the 'ought'.

It's not just that politicians failed to stop the bombers, it's that they framed the whole context in which the bombers are operating. The politicians are themselves bombers: they bomb from 15,000 feet, but they still bomb. That's why Blair refused to condemn bombing when he condemned suicide bombing last week.

there's no space in you argument for the *choice* of people to react to x and y in this way. the men who set up camps in afghanistan. the men who procred the weapons, and those who carried them. you can't reduce this down to one cause -- 'america' -- and leave it at that, qed.

the war was unpopular. if hating the war was the only cause, how come all of us who hated the war aren't bombing buses? after all, the context has been thus framed.

you think? so not a response to israel/iraq at all? these terrorists are all *really* lamenting the decline of the organized left. if only they could see the still glowing light of russian communism and leave out all the theocratic dogmatism (oh hang on no, maybe there is a kind of affinity here) they could be genuine anti-imperialists... this has been a george galloway dream.

And you know as well as I do that there's no connection between Bin Laden and the "organised left": before he was fighting the US he was fighting the USSR.

Well, that's like saying hackers are fighting monopolies when they make a virus that exploits a loophole in Internet Explorer. It is and isn't true.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/4741965.stm

I think they were taking people's names and addresses. I can't think why, unless it is to write to them and apologise for the inconvenience.