We don’t know much, if anything, about the who the bombers are or what their motives were. It seems highly likely that a radical Islamic group is responsible, and that it had something to do with the war in Iraq.
**
Having said that, let’s assume for the purposes of this thread, that it was a group seeking revenge for Britain’s role in the Iraq war. What I’d really like to debate is the culpability of the various parties if that scenario is true. **
Which is a tremendously silly thing for Mr. Clarke to say, given that the claim of responsibility issued shortly after the bombings called them an act of revenge for “massacres” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Not sure what this has to do with what I wrote, but if someone is trying to defend the War on Iraq then thats their lookout. From my view point its pretty much indefensable as a policy decision…especially in retrospect. But whether it was a good or bad policy decision, I’m not seeing it as having any impact on what happened in London…unless someone finds some proof that it was Iraqi home grown terrorists attacking London because…well, I guess because they couldn’t get to the US since we’ve most likely pissed off the Iraqi people a hell of a lot more than our Brit cousins have.
-XT
Ok John, its your thread…sorry for hijacking it.
Assuming that this group was motivated solely by revenge on Britian for its role in Iraq then I’ll still go with my original answer that the US/UK are to blame/responsible for their war in Iraq, but the terrorists are to blame/responsible for bombing innocent civilians in London.
-XT
FWIW, here is a list of all AQ attacks prior to this one:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2005/07/07/GR2005070701332.html
Sorry, may require free registration.
For some reason it mentions Richard “shoe-bomber” Reid, but does not mention other failed attacks, such as the Bojinka plot or the Millenium plot
The main article is pretty interesting too.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/07/AR2005070702389.html
Something interesting I heard on the news . . . a guy from (I think) the UK Observer was talking with NPR about the attacks, and was asked whether Muslim leaders were condemning the attacks and cooperating fully with authorities.
He said that while they were condemning the attacks in the strongest terms, he couldn’t say that they were cooperating fully with the authorities. Most UK Muslims were extremely opposed to British policy in Iraq and have spent the last few years feeling very alienated from their government, and there simply wasn’t enough trust between Muslim leaders and the British government to allow for full cooperation.
If we assume that’s true, and further that some of these Muslim leaders might have known who the radicals were that were advocating violence but didn’t pass this information along to the police, I have a couple questions:
- Do those leaders who didn’t pass the information along to the police, do they share in responsibility for the bombing?
- Does the government which let relations with Muslim leaders sour to such a degree, the government who knowingly hurt their domestic intelligence-gathering capabilities be damaged by an overseas war, share in the responsbility for the bombing?
I, of course, answer yes to both questions (with the assumptions as above). What about others?
Daniel
I made a small but important mistake in phrasing my question the first time around. Yes, of course you wouldn’t be responsible for someone else’s “bad acts,” but you would nonetheless be responsible for the forseeable consequences of your own actions, and in this case those consequences include a homicide. In other words, because of your negligence, don’t you bear some responsibility for the victim’s death?
Yes (or, again, to phrase it more accurately: you are partly to blame for the consequences which you knew to be likely but did nothing to prevent).
As others have said, it’s not a zero-sum game. The merchant’s culpability stemming from his negligence in no way lessens the thiefs culpability.
I’ll just second Daniel’s response to this. These are somewhat murky waters, ethically, but no man is an island.
I think that the answers to these question depend on how we want to use the words. What seems reasonable to me is this: we are responsible for all of the forseeable consequences of our actions – we must take them into account when making decisions, and must accept the extent to which they counter-balance whatever good comes from our actions. We are only culpable (or blameworthy) for those bad consequences if we were negiligent or nefarious in our decision-making.
In your police-chief example, he is partly responsible for his wife’s death, since he must have known that reprisals against his family were made more likely by his actions, but he is certainly not culpable. In fact, he is heroic, because he was willing to jeopardize his own interests for the sake of the greater good.
The Iraq situation is less clear, of course. I think the war was a terrible mistake, so I’m likely to say that the administration is partly “to blame” for the war’s bad consequences. OTOH, I do believe there were good intentions behind the invasion, and I’m sure there was much solemn deliberation. I just think it was awful decision-making.
Fair enough. I’d probably do the same.
OK: given a theoretical situation where the US didn’t want to invade Iraq, but several other countries did (with more or less equivalent manpower), and they also did it in violation of UN mandates, would Britain have gone to war?
It doesn’t seem - and I admit that it’s an impression, not a fact, but it is an impression - that, rather than being forced to do anything, Blair thinks having America onside is more important than most anything else, even to the point of an unjust war and alienating other allies.
(From lurking I know that whether or not the war was unjust has been discussed to death here, so it’s probably not beneficial for me to try to debate it again. Just to state my position though: I do think it was unjustified; I was unsure until the downing st memos and other information about the country leaders’ knowledge came out).
Blair appears to be doing what insecure people often do, seeking refuge in going along with the strongest person out there. Presumably the Prime Minister isn’t insecure in general terms, but his behaviour with regard to the US is often like the new kid sucking up to the biggest kid in the schoolyard.
LarryBorgia, thanks for the link, that’s a good timeline (it didn’t make me register, btw). Still, the only pre-war non-military attacks were Bali and the earlier WTC bombing. (The Israeli-owned hotel is part of a whole different conflict). My original post on that subject was in response to someone who said that Muslims had a long history of being terrorists long before the attacks, which is why I’m being so specific about it being pre-war and non-military.
I’m not saying that Muslims have never engaged in terrorism, just that ‘Muslims’ don’t have a long history of terrorism any more than any other group, which is what was stated. With the IRA and ETA you could easily argue that Christians have a long history of terrorism too. They do. It means nothing. It doesn’t justify invading any country or targeting any religious group.
Calling al-Qaeda more of a brand than a coherent military group sounds on the nail to me.
The full Charles Clarke quote:
Which puts rather a different spin on things.
The Metropolitan Commissioner (Chief of Police in London basically, for anyone who didn’t know) has also said that:
Basically, nobody knows. It does seem likely that it was al-Qaeda or an offshoot of that brand, so that’s what I’m assuming for this thread too.
The big reason that there’s ongoing chatter about ‘was it a suicide attack’ is because of one fairly credible eyewitness report, from a guy who got off the bus just before it exploded, who saw a guy repeatedly fidgeting with a bag. Could be suicide, could be (as suggested in other threads) a mistake with a bomb that should have already been planted, could be nothing to do with it. But with so few facts, the media are bound to focus on the few points they have.
Turkey did not support the Iraq war and refused to allow coalition forces to enter it’s territory. AQ bombed Istanbul anyway.
Indonesia opposed the Iraq war. AQ bombed Jakarta anyway.
AQ has directly threatened Norway and France despite their opposition the Iraq war.
A massive AQ plot against Spain was disrupted after Spain withdrew from the coalition.
AQ decreed that it is the duty of every Muslim to kill all Americans back in 1998. OBL declared Jihad against the U.S. in 1996.
On 9/11, AQ made no demands to the U.S. concerning Iraq or anything else. They don’t want us to do anything. They want us to die. Many months later AQ said it’s war against the U.S. would continue until the U.S. converts to Islam - a ridiculous demand that can only mean they expect to attack us into perpetuity.
Americans and Europeans are infidels. Europeans are colonists and crusaders. Russians fight Muslims in Chechnya. Spain is sacred Islamic land that must be liberated. Arabian governments are corrupt and un-Islamic. Shiites are heretics.
They need no excuse to come after us. They attacked us before this foolish incursion into Iraq and they will attack us after the war is over.
While this is the inarguable truth, there are many here that just don’t understand that.
Not inarguable truth at all. At best, informed conjecture, applying a single motive to
a decentralized terroist organization comprising thousands (?) of members.
The organization’s main immediate goal is the overthrow of what it sees as the corrupt and heretical governments of Muslim states, and their replacement with the rule of Shari’a (Islamic law). Al-Qaeda is intensely anti-Western, and views the United States in particular as the prime enemy of Islam. Bin Laden has issued several “fatwas” or religious rulings calling upon Muslims to take up arms against the United States. He, or stand-ins for him, continue to release videotaped messages threatening or calling for attacks against the United States, Western regimes, Israel and Muslim regimes that do not subscribe to his dogmas. They attempts to radicalize existing Islamic groups and create Islamic groups where none exist. They advocate destruction of the United States, which is seen as the chief obstacle to reform in Muslim societies. They supports Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya, Eritera, Kosova, Pakistan, Somalia, Tajikistan and Yemen.
Timeline:
February 26, 1993: Six people killed and about a thousand injured after a truck bomb explodes in the basement of the World Trade Center towers in New York.
October 3, 4 1993: Eighteen American soldiers are attacked and killed in Mogadishu, Somalia. A U.S. indictment later charged bin Laden and his followers with training the attackers. This is the incident described in the movie Black Hawk Down.
January, 1995: Following an explosion in a Manila apartment, Philippine police uncover a plot, code-named Bojinka or “Big Bang,” to blow up 12 airplanes bound for the U.S. Authorities arrest Abdul Hakim Murad, a Pakistani who is an associate of Ramzi Yousef, implicated in the Twin Towers bombing.
November 13, 1995: Five US soldiers and two Indian nationals are killed and more than 60 people wounded when a car bomb explodes in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
June 25, 1996: Nineteen killed and 386 wounded when a truck bomb explodes at the US military base of Khobar near the town of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia.
August 7, 1998: 224 people killed and over 5000 injured, mostly Africans, when US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in east Africa are bombed.
October 12, 2000: 17 US sailors killed and 38 injured when a suicide attack on USS Cole in Aden is carried out.
September 11, 2001: Nearly 3,000 killed as hijacked airliners destroy the Twin Towers in New York city and crash into the Pentagon.
April, 2002 : Explosion at historic synagogue on the island of Djerba, in Tunisia leaves 21 dead, including 14 German tourists.
May, 2002: A car explodes outside hotel in Karachi, Pakistan, killing 14, including 11 French citizens.
June, 2002: A bomb explodes outside American Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, killing 12.
October 12, 2002: A bomb explodes in a Bali nightclub killing 202 people, many of them Westerners. Islamic group Jemaah Islamiah (JI) is blamed for the blasts. In the months following the attacks about 30 alleged JI members are arrested and put on trial. This group is widely believed to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda. Recently (April 3, 2004) suspects in the bombing said they were inspired by Fatwas of Bin Laden, but the leader of Jemaah Islamiah denies any connection to Al-Qaeda or Bin Laden:
Mohamed Nasir Abbas, one of the four men interviewed by Malaysia’s TV3, said the bombings were inspired by religious edicts, known as fatwas, attributed to bin Laden.
“People who believed in the fatwa carried out bombings,” Nasir said. “Therefore they bombed churches. The bombing in Bali was based on a policy to take revenge against America.”
(smh.com.au April 3, 2004 - Bali bombs ‘inspired’ by bin Laden)
November 28, 2002: Two attacks are launched against Israeli targets in Mombasa, Kenya. A hotel blast kills 16 - including the three suicide bombers - and a missile is fired but misses an Israeli plane. A message on a website purporting to come from al-Qaeda claims responsibility for the attack.
May 12, 2003: At least 34 people are killed in a series of bomb attacks in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh, hitting luxury compounds housing foreign nationals and the offices of a US-Saudi company. The US and Saudi Governments say al-Qaeda is the prime suspect for blasts, which coincide with a visit to the kingdom by US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
May 16, 2003: Casablanca is hit by a series of suicide bombings that kill 41 people, including 12 attackers. Moroccan authorities say that the attacks are linked to “international terror”. Four men convicted and sentenced to death in September for the attacks are said by the Moroccan authorities to be members of the Salafia Jihadia. This group is widely believed to be linked to al-Qaeda.
August 5, 2003: Twelve people die and 150 are injured in a suicide bomb attack at a US-run luxury hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. Indonesia’s defense minister blames Jamaah Islamiah militants for the attack
October 6, 2002: A crew member dies after an apparent suicide bomb attack on a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen. The US Government links the attack to al-Qaeda.
October 28, 2002: U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley is gunned down in front of his house in Amman as he walks to his car. Two men were involved. They were identified as Salem Sa’ed Salem bin Suweid, a Libyan national, and Yasser Fathi Ibraheem, a Jordanian. They confessed to membership in al Qaeda and confessed that they received their orders from a senior al Qaeda leader, Ahmad Fadeel Nazal Al-Khalayleh, known as Abu Musa’ab Al-Zarqawi.
November 15, 2003: At least 23 people are killed and more than 300 injured in two attacks on synagogues in Istanbul.
November 20, 2003: In coordinated attacks on the British Consulate and the HSBC bank offices in Istanbul, 27 people die and more than 450 are injured.
March 11, 2004: Bombs in Madrid city trains kill 192. The Abu Hafs al-Masri group took credit and claimed it was affiliated with Al-Qaeda. Apparently, this is the same group that was involved in Turkish and Saudi bombings. Spanish government claims that the blasts were the work of the Basque ETA separatists were subsequently totally discredited. The announced aim of the terrorist acts is to persuade the Spanish government to withdraw its troops from Iraq. The opposition unseats the government in the subsequent election, and opposition leader Zapatero announces that Spain will withdraw its troops if the Iraq occupation is not put under the aegis of the UN by June 30, 2004.
At least some of the mass terror attacks in Iraq and Russia (associated with Chechnya) are also attributable to Al-Qaeda or groups close to Al-Qaeda.
Thank you for the link, but it doesn’t really support the statement that “Al Qaeda doesn’t want us to do anything. They want us to die.” Most of the quoted ObL statements speak of the need to eliminate American influence and troop presence from Muslim countries, which is what I expected.
Some selections from a Congressional Research Service report – Al Qaeda: Statements and Evolving Ideology. All bolding is mine.
These hardly seem like descriptions of an orgination devoted to murder for the sake of murder. It seems to me that their terrorism has specific political goals.
In fairness, the last two sections of the report leave some uncertainty on this point:
I should note, however, that the purpose of the referenced “confrontation with the West” is left vague – is it to destroy the Western, Christian, Jewish governments at all costs, or would complete Western withdrawal from Muslim affairs be sufficient? I’m not certain, and I’m also not clear on precisely what the report means to imply. However, given this statement in the final paragraph, I’m strongly leaning toward the latter interpretation:
Wow, I didn’t know al-Qaeda weren’t human. Thanks for that information, it’s all clear now.
Al-Qaeda didn’t bomb Indonesia: while that may be ‘widely believed,’ the organisers deny it. It’s not as if al-Qaeda’s ever been ashamed to take credit for anything else.
Instanbul:
And Turkey is a supporter of the US.
Look at this list. There are an awful lot of non-Muslim terrorists out there. If you’re claiming any Muslim group must be linked to al-Qaeda, then I say that the IRA and ETA are linked, and they’re both linked to the Oklahoma bombings since he was a white Christian, as was David Copeland, who killed 160 people in London (targeting gays and ethnic minorities - an acquaintance of mine died in the Admiral Duncan attack).
The Chechen ‘terrorism’ is about independence from Russia, not hatred of non-Muslims. The Palestinian attacks on Israel are waay more complicated than wanting to kill non-Muslims. Most of the al-Qaeda attacks have been against military targets, which aren’t technically terrorism and are different, morally, to me and many others.
Saying that ‘they’ just want to kill everyone and have motives no deeper than a video game character is blinkered, unhelpful, and wrong.
I hate how the argument on American responsibility turned so theoretical, and taken into paths that do not account for an evolution of history. That is, taking one single act and saying it can/cannot be blamed, versus taking into account the entire context that led to this.
This whole mess started due to two factors. First, Israel-Palestine, second, the Cold War. In each of these situations, the American approach, while it did create short term gains, led to the situation we see today.
To protect the oil countries from the spread of Socialist ideas propagated by Nasser in Egypt and the Baath in Syria, America intervened to create a counter balance by maintaining friendly regimes in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf and Jordan. These regimes were by definition corrupt and undemocratic. Monarchies that sought to protect their own power rather than address the wishes of their populations. Moreover, the leaders fo these regimes, and their populations who did not overthrow them, bear and enormous amount of responsibility for their action and inaction, respectively.
But then Iran went belly up, largely because of American and British intervention against Mussadiq and for the Shah, fearing that the former would head towards the Soviets. This forced America to befriend Saddam, a bad idea from the start given the evident cruelty and inhumanity of the man, and his clear incompatibility with what is deemded today the Western values and freedoms.
Isaeli practices were pathetic and inhuman to begin with. Irrelevant of Israel’s right to exist today (which I believe it has), the creation of the state of Israel from the start was unjustified. Saying that the holocaust justifies it is the equivalent of saying French massacres in Algeria justify the Moroccan occupation of Germany. Justifying it along biblical lines, and ‘we were there first’ theories, necessitates the surrendering of Latin America, North America, and Australia to the indigenous populations.
As an essential side note, in 1974, Yasser Arafat, while addressing the United Nations, with American demostrators outside the building booing him, said the following. ‘What has the Palestinian people done to the great American people to deserve their hatred?’. As far as we see it, you hated us first, then said Bin Laden.
This, coupled with no support from Amreica whatsoever for buddig movements calling for democracy in the Arab world, for fear that they may turn socialist, led Arabs and Muslims to form an identity that defined America as the enemy. The all powerful enemy to be blamed for all. This had a lot to do with the fact that Arab regimes were so bloody nasty that they suffocated all capacity to think and all freedom of expression. The West sold them weapons which they used against their own populations rather than Israel. American paranoia of all things left contributed to its disapproval of all ‘freedom movements’. Arab socialists did **not **believe in the Soviet model, but rather in the French, German, or British models (please, no nasty jokes. What can I say, they colonised us). One important note here, very important. America could’ve supported opposition movements in the Arab world. But the ones who brutally repressed and murdered thems were the Arab regimes, not the Americans. Still, I say, in 1914 Wilson was preaching the right of peoples to control their destiny. You had the right principles. Why on earth choose such hideous friends?
All in all, America had a bunch of vile regimes that it was forced to support because a) if they didn’t the Soveits would and b) they made sure that their people would not be allowed to fight Israel, which they could’ve with Soviet support. Somehow, support for Israel had become a cornerstone of American foreign policy. Why is beyond me.
One can see this in two ways, and both are true to an extent. America bears no responsibility, the Arab governments were an evil lot, but this was all that was available, and America had to maintain its interests. America’s only fault was thinking short term. Alternatively, one could say that America bears a good deal of responsibility since it refused to be proactive and create or accept alternatives presented by people that were not inherently hostile to America at the time, and are not today. After all, even if the opposition to Arab regimes was socialist, it was closer to European socialism than to Soveit one. Important case, Iraq was socialist (the Arab Socialist Reserruction Party, the Baath). America could’ve had semi socialist governments that went along with it. Conditional that it gave up supporting Israel or imposed a genuine Pax Americana, rather than Status Quo Americana.
So, rather than be proactive, America embraced what little it had to work with, supported Saddam, supported Saudi Arabia, supported Egypt (which, by the way, was a major fuckup in practice not in principle, Egypt could’ve been forced into democracy at the day of Sadat -he depended on American money to survive- rather than trying to turn it into one thirty years after that. That could’ve been an example to the Arab world as to what peace could bring)
All of that led to the following. There are now new elites (using the word loosely) emerging in the Middle East, that can a) be angry at America and the West and b) do something about it. This is not to say that America bears responsibility for the London bombings, but that this mess had origins in Arab **and **American actions. To abslove either side is rather ignorant, to say the least. America could’ve chosen better friends. America’s now-enemies could’ve fought in a slightly more civilised manner, to put both mildly.
Next time you wonder why you were being attacked in the seventies, eighties and nineties, think of this. The story from then on you know. Yes, I did ignore Al Qaeda, and its roots in anti colonialist thinking presented by Maududi and Qutb, but this was just to put things in a new perspective.
And yes, I am an Arab (Lebanese), but I do not in any way hate Ameica or the West, I’m just pissed off at your choices. But I owe you guys my education. I studied at the American University of Beirut. And now I study in London.
Sorry to have to make this little hijack, but Tim McVeigh, while raised Catholic, was an athiest. He was not affiliated with any church as an adult, put down ‘athiest’ on his Army dogtags, and, while most of the people in the right-wing militias he associated with were indeed Christian cultists and/or racists, he was neither. He even got the Last Rites only as a favor to his father. Sorry, it just bugs me a little when people point to him as a ‘Christian terrorist’; it’s like painting the Son of Sam as a ‘Jewish serial killer’.
Perhaps AQ has an underlying political basis. Doesn’t mean it can’t evolve into something much more nihilisitc. I think it’s at the point of overreaching itself and becoming far too sloppy and indiscriminate–I mean, the Egyptian ambassador? Margaret Hassan, a care worker and Muslim? And I’m pretty sure that the name of Shakera Islam will become pretty well-known in the Muslim world as well. Her family was on the Beeb last night; they’re telegenic, articulate, and a total mix of traditional Islamic values and British voices and outlook.
If we leave Iraq right now, either AQ and its people will take over, since they have no compunction of killing outright anybody who bugs them (and every other poor slob in a 50-foot radius) or a Saddam-like strongman will rise to keep them down. And all the finger-pointing and whining “But Bush started it!” is totally irrelevant to that; that’s why nobody really wants to hear it anymore. I’m also one of those who thinks that AQ would simply find another excuse to do what it wants, where it wants. Of course, leaving the beehive alone is often the best solution. But if there’s too many damn bees around, sometimes you have to put on the suit and get the smoke and take the thing down and destroy it for good.
His actual beliefs don’t really matter. He was raised Christian and that was his culture. Many of al-Qaeda probably have Islam have a culture rather than a religion too. I can’t check that, of course, but neither can anyone else. I know for a fact that a few of the young Chechen Moslems who are rebelling are agnostic atheist (I taught a classful of them).
The point is, the claim that all ‘Muslims’ hate all Westerners and just want to kill them because they’re Westerners cannot be backed up by listing disparate groups with varying motivations and histories.
Great post Selenus. Going away to think about it now.
Just to follow up on my last post (105), I think the list of attacks clearly shows that AQ was killing people well before the Iraq war. (I must admit I’m still not sure why that needs to have been shown 
). While the Iraq war may have altered their focus, it’s pretty obvious they would have been attacking westerners somewhere, whether we were in Iraq or not.
The article claims that Counter-terror operations have fractured AQ into a more diffuse set of local groups. Unfortunately for Europeans, this means there will be more attacks against targets in Europe. It’s simply easier for terrorists to launch small scale attacks there rather than in the U.S. But if this is true it is a result of counter terror, not the Iraq war, and is not something anyone should be blamed for. (Other than the terrorists themselves, of course.)
Also, not everyone believes that AQ no longer functions as a coherent organization. Richard Clarke, for one, is convinced that AQ is still planning for another spectacular attack on U.S. soil.
Selenus, that was a well thought out post. I can’t respond in detail to it yet. However while tracing the origins of things back through history is fascinating and important, It doesn’t seem to me that it’s productive in ascribing praise or blame.
Following your logic I could blame the London attacks on the Ottoman empire. Had they not grown so weak, the British and French would not have had the mid east to partition, and the current situation would be different than it is now.
I’m having trouble understanding how these examples help us understand the topic of the OP. In the first two examples, you are morally responsible for your actions. It doesn’t matter whether the guy is a cop or a thief, you were the direct cause of their deaths. In the last two, your neighbors have the same moral responsibility that you had in the first two.
There are clearly some legal distinctions, but I don’t see any moral distinctions in terms of responisbility.