What is is with George Galloway?

ok, so let's allow that afghanistan and iraq have made the islamists measurably more driven and vicious. now what? full withdrawal from both would, by that logic, leave us with pre-invasion islamist attitudes and activies. which is only world trade center I, uss cole, khobar towers, and 9/11 itself. great!

How terribly reassuring.

People should note that the act of killing others and oneself in the process isn't rational so degree level political sophistication misses the point entirely. The British Army entered Northern Ireland in 1969 to protect the Catholic population but that didn't matter - it was an occupying force upholding a state of affairs that led to daily iniquities and humiliations that lead to people snapping. Most people who joined the IRA in the 70s didn't do it after careful consideration of the politcial situation; they did it because they'd been beaten up by the police, or the army or being searched for the 50th time that year, or their parents house was trashed by the army. They did it in rage, not reason.

You're on very dodgy ground indeed here. By detaching terrorism from any motive and any rationale, you come close to some weird conception of Muslim "original sin". Is it a racial or cultural proclivity, then? Why aren't disaffected black youths planting bombs?

And you do know that the French journalists you cite as proof that there might be French casualties were released by their captors, don't you?

what is the 'rationale' then, momus? given the current state of iraq, surely an attack on iran would make about as much sense.

And this is the point about anti-enlightenment fundamentalism - fanatics like these are at their most dangerous not when they're spouting their medievalist nonsense but when they're telling the truth. The BNP's wild nonsense about Jewish conspiracies is easily swatted aside, it's when they start talking about the white working class being ignored is when they start to pose a threat. Ditto fundamentalism - the truth of the injustices of Palestine and Iraq is far more dangerous than the fantasies of their theocratic bullshit.

The big solution to this problem is to make vehicles which don't run on oil, and humans which don't run on religion.

we're a long way off that mate. and to religious people, and people who define themselves as religious, its this kind of thing that can be problematic, setting up non-religousity as superior to religion, the subtext that their religion makes them lesser, inferior, and you're above that somehow. thats another 'clash of civilizations' being set up there, isnt it, another dichotomy. aetheism vs islam? maybe, thats exactly how its being sold to people on the other side of that divide.

im not religious in the slightest btw

Dissafected black youths may well be planting bombs. Think Richard Reid.

I don't have any weird conception of "Muslim original sin". Nonetheless, Islamist terrorism is religious before it's political. It's about an extreme milleniallism, which is of course linked to the political situation but plays on a lot of other things as well. It's a mentality that has a lot more psychologically in common with cult mentalities (Heaven's Gate etc) than it does with IRA-type political militancy, which is why I think reducing it all to politics presents a skewed picture.

And you do know that the French journalists you cite as proof that there might be French casualties were released by their captors, don't you?

Yeah. It's well known that very large ransoms were paid for the release of the three French hostages. Their release had nothing to do with the government's support or lack of support for the war. Ditto for the released Italian hostage, despite the presence of Italian troops in Iraq.

Re-building secular politics will take a hell of a lot of time, but won't happen if left-secular parties with an agenda to tackle the profiteering in the reconstruction are told that such issues are beyond change and debate; by saying that secular politics can't tackle injustice, you leave the door for alternatives that aren't so accomodating with the rule of law.

The West certainly should sort out its relations with the Middle East in an equitable and humanitarian way and Muslims certainly have legitimate grievances, but even in the unlikely situation where these problems are addressed, I'm not at all sure what effect it would have on extreme Islamist terrorism. (After all, why did far-left European terrorism die out in the early eighties? Was it because any of their grievances were being addressed? Actually, the opposite is true, because there was an across-the-board lurch to the right across Europe in the 80s.)

both of these views are myopic. Of course the rise of Al-Qaeda occurred independently of and prior to the Iraq invasion but that doesn't mean that that invasion hasn't hugely inflated their stock and, quite obviously to any rational being, made Britain more likely to suffer attack. we were a target before; we are more of a target now. al qaeda's greatest talent has been to co-opt small, local, often territorial grievances into their cause, because they offer method, structure and, crucially, publicity. The m/o is to turn locally motivated political radicals into, sometimes unwitting, fighters for a global caliphate under sharia law. the war in iraq, our lack of action on palestine, our mute ambivalence towards helpful dictatorships in pakistan, uzbekistan etc are all aiding and abetting this cause. the fight against specific terrorists in london, new york or anywhere else is only going to be won after we address the situation globally.

If you look at the profiles of Marx and the Marxists, they hardly fit the picture of the oppressed proletariat either. They're mostly introspective, privileged, educated young men, often living in relative cultural isolation in foreign countries...

1. the house of saud revoked his citizenship years ago and hate him plenty since he's called for their overthrow and
2. he's yemeni anyway.

there is a bit of a contradiction here -- the west's action, its inaction, and its ambivalence in widely different circumstances are all providing justification for terrorists.

I think I'm with Momus and Scott on this one TBH. I think Galloway is outnumbered by the US and UK governments and media and so it is very easy for them to tar and feather him, accuse him of sympathising and indeed collaborating with terrorists (as opposed to just blowing the shit out of them), even blaming him for the London bombings.

In the same way that anti-war protestors in America are deemed anti-American, the British parliament and press appear to have extracted everything about his character, his history, his politics and actions, then spun them into some kind of monstrous semi-truth. He opposes the conflict in Iraq, therefore he is a Stalinist, a fascist, an Iraqi sympathiser, a terrorist, a Cunt. I haven't actually read any real reasons on this thread for why I should actively dislike him. His election campaign may have been slightly conniving but no more so than any of the major parties.

I think it's safe to say that had the US been less obsessed with gung-ho kick ass shite and been more attuned to the need to keep 'the international community' onside and acted with greater sensitivity all round, the invasion of Iraq migth have been had a different aftermath. It's a big maybe, and sadly, we'll never know. We can say for sure that the invasion has been the most appallingly handled exercise in community relations since, well, ever. It's been so badly done that it's like the script is being written by extremist terrorists, who through cunning plans are lulling the US into doing exactly what's necessary to really make a great big fuck up of it.

Asking whether the war was right misses the point. The motivation might have been right, but any advances due to the righteousness have been undone by the manne of its conduct, and indeed, claims to righteousness are undermined by the manner of its prosecution.

Sadly, this all leads us to today. As people rightly say, we can't just withdraw. Or can we? There's an argument that I've some sympathy with that whatever gains are made by our presence there are lost many times over and that if we're genuinely interested in democracy developing in Iraq, we have to let it develop. If democracy is the US's bitch, wither democracy.

Does that mean you think we shouldn’t have taken control - along with the French - of the Ottoman Empire after WWI (after it had sided against us)?

Do you think it's really the expression of a genuine grievance when muslims whine about being victims of imperialism for having had their EMPIRE dismantled?

An empire under which a million armenians were massacred for seeking equal rights and thereby invalidating the contract of servitude by which jihad allows defeated infidels' lives to be spared.

Which had subjugated countless non-muslims groups for its 600 year history, until the British, having took over, forceably ended the practise (as well as the arab slave trade in black africans)

Do you not think these emergent liberal attitudes in the West and the lack of same in the Arab world might not have more to do with their economic stagnation than some imaginary oppression under the very short-lived period of British colonialism, administered by generally sympathetic Arabists?

bro, there's huge differences between turks and arabs!

Also, hey look over there, it's Niall Ferguson! He's here to tell us that colonialism was the best thing that ever happened to the world, and it's about time those ungrateful darkies stopped blaming the West, and those whining white liberals stopped feeling so guilty! Woot!

I absolutely agree the logic of this, but if so let the pro-war lobby - including the government - have the courage of their convictions and say so. For Blair and the right-wing press this is the truth that dare not speak its name: that they knew they were almost certainly increasing the risk of terrorist attack on the UK, but they thought that was a price worth paying. Stop insulting our intelligence by hyprocritically claiming that only "naive" people believe there is a possible and even likely connection between the war and what happened last Thursday.

The terrible dilemna here is that Iraq was never a real issue in the war on terror. It was creatively grafted on as an imagined two-fer. Saddam's Ba'athist Iraq was always a regional military and political problem and then an international problem involving the U.N. as a result of his invasion of Kuwait. You can come down on either side of the Gulf War I or sanctions debate and still have the intellectual honesty to realize that terrorism was not really the problem w/Iraq.

Now that we've dug ourselves into this hole, the prosepct of making concessions to homicidal maniacs even more crazy than our own military establishments, and not necessarily even Iraqi natives is not one that any modern politician knows how to do. Nixon couldn't get the U.S. out of Vietnam except through deceit and stealth and extended carnage. The first politician to cave will go down not only to electoral defeat but to ignominy and they all know it. To leave Iraq, which has plenty of tribal, sectarian, and regional divisions to overcome, to the murderous hands of foreign jihadis would not only be seen as cowardly by the insurgents but as faithless, fickle and shameful by those Iraqis who did welcome the fall of the Ba'athists.

The authority the terrorists use to demand that we leave Saudi, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or 'Palestine' has very little to nothing to do with the wishes of the local population, but with their own unforgiving interpretation of the Koran and their notions of history. I will grant that theirs is not an illegitimate political position, however distasteful they may seem to me in the particulars, but it's a piss-poor justification for exploding bombs in commuter trains or flying airplanes into office buildings. I cannot criticize the cynical, vengeful treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo only to turn and justify the kind of hideous violence the Taleban and their Al-Qaeda friends inflicted not only on their avowed political enemies but on any socially recalcitrant Afghans.

We need to show the carrot as well as the stick, and when we use the stick we need to use it wisely. If your going to sink so low as to kill people, the least you can do is be effective about it and Rumsfeld et al., by putting Afghanistan on the back burner, trying to occupy Iraq on the cheap, and failing to plan sufficiently ahead for either have as the evil Fouché put it (though it's commonly attributed to Talleyrand), "committed worse than a crime, (they've) committed a blunder."

Neither Rumsfeld's blunders nor Al-Qaeda's malice should prevent the U.S. nor Britain from doing the only honorable thing left, which is to try to set up as decent and stable a government as possible in Iraq, to help that nation and regime to develop, and then to pull our troops out.

i still think a little more internationalization is a good idea (most productively outside europe and probably outside the UN — neither would get involved)

It'd doubtless another thread, but this seems like nonsense.