The Reality of This Barbaric Bombing - by Robert Fisk

Extracts from the article published in The Independent on 8 July 2005:

"If you bomb our cities," Osama bin Laden said in one of his recent
video tapes, "we will bomb yours." There you go, as they say. It was
crystal clear Britain would be a target ever since Tony Blair decided
to join George Bush's "war on terror" and his invasion of Iraq. We
had, as they say, been warned. The G8 summit was obviously chosen,
well in advance, as Attack Day.

And it's no use Mr Blair telling us yesterday that "they will never
succeed in destroying what we hold dear". "They" are not trying to
destroy "what we hold dear". They are trying to get public opinion to
force Blair to withdraw from Iraq, from his alliance with the United
States, and from his adherence to Bush's policies in the Middle East.
The Spanish paid the price for their support for Bush - and Spain's
subsequent retreat from Iraq proved that the Madrid bombings achieved
their objectives - while the Australians were made to suffer in Bali.

It's easy for Tony Blair to call yesterday's bombings "barbaric" - of
course they were - but what were the civilians deaths of the
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart by
cluster bombs, the countless innocent Iraqis gunned down at American
military checkpoints? When they die it's "collateral damage"; when
"we" die it is "barbaric terrorism".

If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us believe
insurgency won't come to us? One thing is certain: if Tony Blair
really believes that by "fighting terrorism" in Iraq we could more
efficiently protect Britain - fight them there rather than let them
come here, as Bush constantly says - this argument is no longer
valid.

To time these bombs with the G8 summit, when the world was
concentrating on Britain, was not a stroke of genius. The G8 summit
was announced so far in advance as to give the bombers all the time
they needed to prepare.

Now let us reflect on the fact that yesterday, the opening of the G8, so
critical a day, so bloody a day, represented a total failure of
security services - the same intelligence "experts" who claim there
were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there were none, but
who utterly failed to uncover a months-long plot to kill Londoners.

And then come the Muslims of Britain, who have long been awaiting
this nightmare. Now everyone of our Muslims becomes the "usual
suspect", the man or woman with brown eyes, the man with the beard,
the woman in the scarf, the boy with the worry beads, the girl who
says she's been racially abused.…

And this is part of the point of the bombings: to divide British
Muslims from British non-Muslims (let us not mention the name
Christians), to encourage the very kind of racism that Tony Blair
claims to resent.

But here's the problem. To go on pretending that Britain's enemies
want to destroy "what we hold dear" encourages racism; what we are
confronting here is a specific, direct, centralised attack on London
as a result of a "war on terror" which Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara has
locked us into. Just before the US presidential elections, Bin Laden
asked: "Why do we not attack Sweden?"

Lucky Sweden. No Osama bin Laden there. And no Tony Blair.