Georgio Bush and Antonio Blair launched the war on terror after 9/11. They were going to make the world safe from terror. Forget that they had armed the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Russians, and Saddam Hussein against the Iranians. Forget that they traded intimately with the Saudi princes whose money bankrolled the fundamentalist ideologists. Times, they said, had changed…
Well, they got that right, but not as they meant it. Now it’s worse.
This year there were bombs across the globe. Jaysus, there were so many bombs you couldn’t count ‘em. Small ones, large ones, middling ones, detonated by every conceivable kind of group. And not just in Iraq.
But some were more sinister than others. In February, there was a massive car bomb in Beirut that killed the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Syrian intelligence was blamed. If so, it backfired. Syria had to pull its troops out of Lebanon.
And on July 7th, a series of bombs exploded in London. Over 50 people died, including two Irish. There were many close escapes. In a sense, it was close for everyone here as well as in the UK. Any one of us might have been there on a cheap flight.
What really set the cat among the pigeons, though, was that three of the suicide-bombers were British-born, from Leeds. None had been identified as hardcore al-Qa’eda supporters.
It was the nightmare scenario. And two weeks later there were more bombs, but fortunately they didn’t explode.
And so it went. Later in the year there were bombs in Turkey. Among the tourists who died was 17-year old Tara Whelan from Waterford. More bombs hit Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt where there were heavy casualties. In October it was Bali again, and over 20 died as beach resorts were targeted by Islamic militants. At the end of October dozens died as bombs hit a busy Delhi market – at least 49 perished.
Yes, almost every victim of a bomb is innocent – this is terrorism’s greatest and most unforgivable abomination. But innocents suffer at other hands too, exactly as the terrorists intend. It’s as though, along with our darkest fears, terrorist attacks have released the worst excesses of testosterone and adrenalin.
The official response in what might be called threatened states has been draconian. Security has replaced economic growth as the top governmental ‘homeland’ priority in the USA. Along the way, police and intelligence forces are given license to abuse, as is the case in Guantanamo and quite certainly in Iraq, and to kill.
You’ll remember how a man was shot dead by armed coppers in Stockwell.
All sorts of stories were spun. Police said he was ‘directly linked to terrorism’. But witnesses told how he had been shot eight times in the head while on the ground. None used the word ‘executed’, but that’s what they were describing.
It turned out that he was an innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, aged 27. Nothing to do with terror, except what he himself felt as the police lined him up. Dreadful. His appalling and unnecessary death encapsulated all the risks inherent in getting gung-ho.
It’s the way of the world now. Either side might get you. And you know not the day nor the hour.
Thanks Georgio. Thanks Antonio.