Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker talking about the London bombings.
”Yet the antiwar left (and right) did not hesitate to blame Blair and Bush for what had happened in London. The bizarre left-wing M.P. George Galloway was the first off the mark, insisting within hours that the bombings were the inevitable payback for the war in Iraq. He was so clearly lacking in tact and a sense of fitness that no one took him seriously. But serious people quickly made the same argument; as early as Friday morning, journalists like Tariq Ali, in the Guardian, were saying flatly that what had happened had happened because Britain was in Iraq. The United States and Britain began the war in Iraq with the certainty, the argument goes, that they would cause many civilian casualties in pursuit of their political goal, and that the response, however brutal and inhumane, is part of the normal calculations of organized violence.
Against this argument is the view that the new kind of terrorism is essentially nihilist and apocalyptic, and that Iraq is only a kind of inchoate excuse. “After all, the African embassy bombings happened before Iraq,” Mark Urban, the diplomatic editor of the BBC program “Newsnight,” said. “The I.R.A. had a political arm, and a political goal, however unreal: they killed to get people to the table.
What is there to negotiate with these people? An end to the American presence in Saudi Arabia? All right, we’ll consider it. The elimination of the State of Israel? Hmm, that may be a bit more difficult. The restoration of a universal Islamic caliphate? It may be a bit of a deal-breaker, that.”
They are killing us not because we are in Iraq, they are killing us because in their teaching we were born apostates and unless we convert to their religion they will continue killing us.
It may be a bit of a deal-breaker, indeed
Refresh my memory, how many troops did Egypt have in Iraq?
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