Big Picture

From Bad Attitudes--Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, has zero sympathy for terrorists or terrorism...but that doesn't mean he's ready to stomp around and threaten to turn vast swaths of the earth into parking lots:

Decades of British and American intervention in the oil-rich Middle East motivated the London bombers, Ken Livingstone has suggested.

The London mayor told BBC News he had no sympathy with the bombers and he opposed all violence.

But he argued that the attacks would not have happened had Western powers left Arab nations free to decide their own affairs after World War I.

Instead, they had often supported unsavoury governments in the region.

Mr Livingstone was asked on BBC Radio 4's Today programme what he thought had motivated the bombers.

He replied: "I think you've just had 80 years of western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the western need for oil.

"We've propped up unsavoury governments, we've overthrown ones we didn't consider sympathetic.

"And I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s... the Americans recruited and trained Osama Bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan.

"They didn't give any thought to the fact that once he'd done that he might turn on his creators."

No Justice?

Mr Livingstone said Western governments had been so terrified of losing their fuel supplies that they had kept intervening in the Middle East.

He argued: "If at the end of the First World War we had done what we promised the Arabs, which was to let them be free and have their own governments, and kept out of Arab affairs, and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect this wouldn't have arisen."

He attacked double standards by Western nations, such as the initial welcome given when Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq.

There was also the "running sore" of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

"A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn't a just foreign policy," said Mr Livingstone.

We could learn a lot from this sort of response--it's not a cop out, there's no "therapy" involved here--it's an understanding that vicious acts like terrorist bombings don't occur in a vacuum. It would be to our benefit to show some awareness of things like facts or history.

When George Bush, in contrast, insists that it's simply a matter of terrorists "hating freedom," he not only reveals his own intellectual laziness, but he insults the intelligence of the free citizens of his own country, and the larger western world.

We're adults, not children (although Bush reading My Pet Goat on 9/11 is probably fitting--not only is he intellectually lazy, he is patronizing to an outrageous degree). Livingstone seems aware of this level of maturity, and treats Londoners as such--and, by extension, the rest of us, since we are ALL Londoners, we are ALL Madriders, and we are ALL New Yorkers. As adults, we need to recognize that juvenile barking--or, worse, lying to invade a country that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda's vicious attacks--not only won't solve the problem of terrorism, but instead will exacerbate it.

Oh, and to cite another post from Bad Attitudes, James Doolittle reminds us that the GOP didn't always opt for the moonbat approach:

While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs …

We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome.

Those are the words of--George Bush...the older one.