In The Name Of War

It’s easy for me. When the news came through about the bombs in London, the instinctive reaction was to think first of friends and loved ones who might just happen to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time in what is a vast and extraordinary city. None of them were. But thousands of people all over England and further afield had a different experience to mine. It is dreadful even to contemplate what it must have been like, as individuals and families were confronted with the terrible truth, their worst nightmares coming home to roost as the identity of those who had died started to become clear. My sister. My husband. My brother. My lover. My friend. Dead. Gone. My world changed utterly. How can I go on?

Seventy dead, ten times that number injured and Christ knows how many more deeply traumatised. How is that for a morning’s work? And the perpetrators vanished into the early morning mists, the confusion of London stretching and yawning, their grisly deeds done, not even blood on their hands to show for it. But blood on their souls, or what might pass for souls in people – am I right to call them people or is there another word? – capable of such wanton, vindictive, terrible brutality.
The clichés come easy, and I feel them too. Cowardly swine. Sick and twisted fucks. What kind of perverted monsters could commit an act so foul, so base, so utterly unjust and indefensible as this? Easy. But stop and think.
We bred our own brand of sick and twisted fuck here too. Guilford. Birmingham. Belfast. Dublin. Monaghan. Eniskillen. Omagh. And there were dozens of others along the way, bombs that maimed and killed and left families bereaved and corpses to dig into the stony soil. What is it not possible to justify in the name of war? And the people who were responsible for these bombs – am I right to call them people or is there another word? – what do they feel now, looking at the news today and seeing the methods they developed, taken onto another even more ruthless plane?
Ah, but we gave warnings. People fucking died.
That wasn’t what we intended. But the risk was always grave and it happened. Innocent people’s blood on the streets. Just like London 2005.
We’re onto the politics of the last atrocity now. That’s where we started. And anyway we haven’t even begun to talk about the people shot in cold blood, the kneecappings, the torture, the beatings, the disappeared, the whole gamut of violence, intimidation and murder that we were familiar with, for over – what was it? – 25 years, no make that more. It isn’t over yet.
What is it not possible to justify in the name of war? That was the other instinctive gut feeling, the question that haunted me, and that must be haunting others with a far more visceral intensity. There is no justification whatsoever for the misery, the heartache, the grief and the damage that has been inflicted on ordinary people – of any and every ethnic, racial, religious, class and professional background – by the five bombs that gouged out the heart of London last week. But I couldn’t help asking – how different is what Londoners are experiencing now from what the ordinary people of Baghdad and other parts of Iraq had inflicted on them during the invasion of their country by the United States and Britain back in 2003. Is there a qualitative difference? Not one that I can see, if you look at it from the perspective of an Iraqi whose house has been levelled in a bomb attack and his wife and children left in a heap of blood and bones.
We went in there to liberate the people of Iraq. Yes, and killed tens of thousands of them in the process. That was a great deal for the dead and the permanently wounded.
But we couldn’t have taken Saddam out without some loss of life. So far over 100,000 Iraqis have died in the war. You think they give a fuck that Saddam was found in a bolt-hole with a bigger beard than anyone had seen on him before? They’re as dead as they will ever be and you’re still alive to give me the queasy rationalisations.
He was a ruthless dictator, who had to be removed to bring democracy to the Iraqis. Some poxy democracy they have now. The Americans and your lads in their bunkers, running the show by proxy. Meanwhile the country has collapsed into anarchy. Another 50 butchered in three separate incidents over the weekend. The death toll keeps rising. And there isn’t the slightest reason to believe that it’s going to change. I mean, if you can’t prevent Islamic hardliners from planting bombs in London, what hope have you got in Baghdad?

What hope have you got in Baghdad? And what the fuck did you think you were doing, going in there in the first place?
This is one question Tony Blair must ask himself as he stares into the mirror every morning, a razor in his hand. Now, look what’s happened. Bodies on the streets and in the underground. London grieving. Birmingham evacuated. And here I am, the man who pushed the button, who sent the fighter planes in, who dropped the bombs – who gave George Bush the support he needed to do the same, and with far deadlier intent. The little shit. Those beady eyes. No heart. No soul. No feeling. Capable of anything. And I hitched my wagon to his fucking caravan.
So what the fuck did you think you were doing going in there in the first place?
If they needed a reason to plant the bombs in London I gave it to them. Maybe they didn’t need one. Maybe they had this bloody outrage planned anyway. Mad muslim zealots. But maybe not. Maybe this is retaliation, pure and simple – retaliation for the fact that I got the spin doctors in, sexed up the report and insisted there were weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s arsenal when I knew in my heart that there weren’t. Retaliation for the fact that we went in there all guns blazing, that we killed and displaced thousands of poor bastards, Arabs all, who never did anyone any harm but who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Retaliation for doing to some of them what they – or their sick fuck brotherhood in Al Qaeda anyway – have done to some of us now. Christ, if I look in this mirror long enough, I might even begin to hallucinate blood on my own hands.

The response of Londoners to the murderous attack on them, and on their brothers and sisters, has been salutary. For the most part, they have been wonderfully dignified, stoical and calm. For the most part too, certainly as it comes across in the media, there has been an absence of the kind of extremism and bile that might have been feared in reaction. Let’s hope that it stays that way. Worryingly, there were 30,000 emails sent to the Muslim Council of Great Britain in the wake of the bombings, letters it’s said that were full of hate and vitriol. It is a lot of emails – revealing a deep well of suspicion and hostility that may currently be bubbling just below the surface.
The priority, of course, has to be to attempt to bring the perpetrators of these crimes to justice. No argument there. In this respect, hopefully, the British police will have learnt a few lessons from Northern Ireland. The last thing we need is a Birmingham Six-style conviction for the bombings, involving a miscarriage of justice, that deepens the alienation of young British Muslims and that galvanises the acolytes of the odious Bin Laden on the ground both in the UK and elsewhere.
You’d think it would be a no-brainer. But then there are other lessons from Northern Ireland that self-evidently have not been learned. The so-called War On Terror may not have had much success – but it has had one effect of which we can be sure. Just as in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, for every terrorist – or ‘freedom fighter’ – you kill or round-up, 10 or 20 more will be inculcated into the ways and the means of the intifada as a result. You cannot beat a guerilla army, however fragmented and uncoordinated the Islamic extremists currently doing battle with George Bush and Tony Blair might seem to be, by repression. On the contrary, it plays into their hands. There is no better recruiting sergeant for Al Qaeda than Tony Blair – except George Bush.
But the bombs prove that Tony Blair was right all along, that the threat represented by Al Qaeda was and is a real one. A self-fulfilling prophesy! These guys represent a threat, so we will have to attack them on their home turf. Oh look, now they’ve bombed us back – we were right all along!
But what of the broader picture? As anyone who spoke out against the war must still believe, Britain should disengage from Iraq. Yes, it is incumbent on us to do everything within our legitimate power to resist the rise of Islamo-fascism. The vast majority of muslims are citizens of a calibre equal to any Christian, Jew, Hindu or Scientologist, but in its militant extremist manifestation, this benighted creed or philosophy is the enemy of all that is good,worthy and decent in the values with which we are familiar in western society. The emphasis, however, has to be on ‘legitimate’.
In relation to this, the British government is caught between its own devils and dust. It was horribly misjudged in the first place to go into Iraq on the basis of a lie. True. But pulling out peremptorily in response to a deadly terror campaign in the capital could be seen as bowing to the terrorists. Also true.
And yet, there will almost inevitably be renewed questions now about British policy on Iraq, and most specifically about the country’s alignment of convenience with the United States. The Dunkirk spirit may have prevailed admirably in the immediate aftermath of the London outrage but people will see that Britain’s too close involvement with the politics and the policies of George Bush is placing its citizens in unwarranted and ongoing danger.
A change of leadership may be the best response. Tony Blair might not be well positioned to effect the shift that is necessary – but Gordon Brown could more credibly engineer a dignified withdrawal of British troops. It won’t do anything to alleviate the pain and the grief of the people affected by the bombings in London, but that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be both politic and right.