Of course there's a link to Iraq

In response to the leading article in New Matilda, 20th July 2005, I submitted this:

You make some interesting observations but miss the point. Tony Blair, George Bush and John Howard were anything but empty or vacuuous after the London bombings. Their well thought out, carefully crafted and precisely worded responses framed and defined analysis in the so-called Western world. Comments by Coalition of the Willing leaders post 7th July have been persistent and orchestrated, giving us an illuminating exercise in the management of public opinion. One message and one message only had to be sent out to be swallowed whole: evil stalks the world in the form of ‘distorted parodies’ of Islam, which guides us to the view that no shred of what motivated the bombers could be comprehensible to people of good faith. Any other message allows the possibility that analysis might be required of what drove those young men to carry out ghastly and wholly wrong acts. Tony Blair in particular (but George Bush too and little Johnnie when he really needs to) can provide us with political rhetoric of the very highest order (that's not a criticism by the way). If you doubt that just witness Mr Blair’s speech in the European Parliament or his defence of the Iraq war almost anywhere at almost any time. That they haven't done so in response to those horrible events in London is not an accident. It's not because their not up to it, quite the reverse: it's because we're all being massaged away from any examination of cause, however deluded the bombers might have been and managed away from the very idea that there might be a cause; away from consideration of other world views (regardless of how utterly opposed to them one might be); beyond analysis, questioning and/or complexity. Allow any of those tools into the discourse and the moral certainties of good versus evil don't fit quite as well. Worryingly, it ends up with the contemptible "astonishment" of the British Foreign Secretary that as dangerously revolutionary an agency as Chatham House could suggest events in Iraq and Afghanistan contribute in some unquantifiable way to the background of events in Madrid and London. Tragically it leads an otherwise thoughtful man like Kim Beazley to talk about eliminating human filth. Have mercy on such nihilism Lord.