Tony Blair's unending cycle of Bush-related problems gained a new twist this week with a leaked document from the head of the Foreign Service warning Blair that British policy in Iraq and the Middle East was feeding Islamic radicalism and doing wonders for recruitment. That's not necessarily surprising, one needs only the barest flicker of sentience to intuit that every time we blow up an Iraqi wedding or refuse to disavow permanent bases we give some Islamic extremist that last push towards violence. What is interesting, though, is the cultural difference between the politics of terrorism across the Atlantic and the way it plays out here. To wit:
Blair has consistently denied a link between Britain's participation in the U.S.-led war in Iraq and the July 7 bombings, which killed 52 people, along with the four presumed bombers, and injured 700 others on three London subways and a bus. Blair has said the accused bombers -- all young Muslim men, several of them British citizens -- were motivated by a "perverse" interpretation of Islam and that similar attacks had been happening since long before the Iraq war began.
In America, Bush's whole rationale for war is based on a terrorist attack from four years ago. Instead of trying to lessen our footprint to calm tensions in the region that cultivated our attackers, the current administration has relied on a rhetoric of revenge: they struck, so we'll hit harder. Were we hit again, the Bush administration would likely institute a draft and flood the Middle East with American troops in service of a wholesale destruction and regeneration of the current order.
England, by contrast, seems basically resigned to the reality of terrorism and don't want to do anything that will make it worse. A history of dealing with its illogic and persistence (in the form of the IRA) is probably causal in that. So rather than using the bombings as proof for his involvement in Bush's Middle East project, Blair has to convince the British that they were an unconnected, inevitable act that would've occurred whether or not British boots had landed in Mesopotamia. That, of course, is absurd. At the same time, Bush's connections to 9/11 are boldfaced, smirking lies. And that's what the Iraq War has come to; a losing conflict justified by one participant's revenge fantasy's and the other's feigned naivete.
