Hearing Voices

Cartoon by Steve Bell (archive)

A major difference between last week's London bombings and the 9/11 attacks is that the shouters who drowned out any kind of analytic response are not nearly as successful as they were in 2001.

When Susan Sontag called the 9/11 bombings "an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions," she was vilified. Bill Maher lost his job. Others were intimidated into silence. In late 2001, to even bring up "specific American alliances and actions" was outside the realm of accepted discourse.

Of course, Sontag was right then, and now, while there is no shortage of idiots braying about "giving in to terrorism" and "appeasement", expressing sentiments like Sontag's is "allowed" again. Without being "pro-terrorist", one can actually posit cause and effect relationships. It's not much, but it's progress of a sort.

From the Guardian, Gary Younge has a piece called Blair's blowback, in which he dares to make an obvious link between Fallujah to London that would not have seen the light of day in 2001. For those seeking documentary evidence about Fallujah, please see here (for an unsettling video travelogue) and here, for "Fallujah in Pictures."

We know what took place. A group of people, with no regard for law, order or our way of life, came to our city and trashed it. With scant regard for human life or political consequences, employing violence as their sole instrument of persuasion, they slaughtered innocent people indiscriminately. They left us feeling unified in our pain and resolute in our convictions, effectively creating a community where one previously did not exist. With the killers probably still at large there is no civil liberty so vital that some would not surrender it in pursuit of them and no punishment too harsh that some might not sanction if we found them.

The trouble is there is nothing in the last paragraph that could not just as easily be said from Falluja as it could from London. The two should not be equated - with over 1,000 people killed or injured, half its housing wrecked and almost every school and mosque damaged or flattened, what Falluja went through at the hands of the US military, with British support, was more deadly. But they can and should be compared. We do not have a monopoly on pain, suffering, rage or resilience. Our blood is no redder, our backbones are no stiffer, nor our tear ducts more productive than the people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those whose imagination could not stretch to empathise with the misery we have caused in the Gulf now have something closer to home to identify with. "Collateral damage" always has a human face: its relatives grieve; its communities have memory and demand action.

These basic humanistic precepts are the principle casualties of fundamentalism, whether it is wedded to Muhammad or the market. They were clearly absent from the minds of those who bombed London last week. They are no less absent from the minds of those who have pursued the war on terror for the past four years.

Tony Blair is not responsible for the more than 50 dead and 700 injured on Thursday. In all likelihood, "jihadists" are. But he is partly responsible for the 100,000 people who have been killed in Iraq. And even at this early stage there is a far clearer logic linking these two events than there ever was tying Saddam Hussein to either 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

It is no mystery why those who have backed the war in Iraq would refute this connection. With each and every setback, from the lack of UN endorsement right through to the continuing strength of the insurgency, they go ever deeper into denial. Their sophistry has now mutated into a form of political autism - their ability to engage with the world around them has been severely impaired by their adherence to a flawed and fatal project. To say that terrorists would have targeted us even if we hadn't gone into Iraq is a bit like a smoker justifying their habit by saying, "I could get run over crossing the street tomorrow." True, but the certain health risks of cigarettes are more akin to playing chicken on a four-lane highway. They have the effect of bringing that fatal, fateful day much closer than it might otherwise be.