What is the point of a car bomb in London?

Acutally, no. Not in NY. In the south? Unlikely.


Now, if you went to the south and had a sign that says, "Jesus is fake"...you might have some people get pissed off. They may even spit at you, or harass you.

Now, go to Egypt and put up the sign "Mohammed is a fake" and you will never leave the country alive. And it will most likely be the gov't who makes sure of that.

 

It will be interesting to see how tragedies such these car bombs play into the 2008 Presidential race. I'd think that Obama would be the most impacted, given his Muslim connections. On the whole, it could shift sentiment towards the right, who is perceived as much stronger on terror.

 

Barack's 'blackness' is what will do him in...

Overall, I am not sure why Repubs are worried about BO, he won't make it out of the Dem primaries.

 

Pelosi was wrong to say this. It is hard to know whether she actually believed this garbage or was like some of the many other Democrat politicians who were just playing to the mob which was inflamed by the NYT and other MSM as evidenced by the disgraceful Judith Miller.

It would be interested to know again what percentage of Americans never supported the Iraq War or fell for the propaganda regarding imminent threat. I believe that I was in roughly 25%. The info was there in the press just slightly to the left of the cowardly MSM that played to the ratings and bottom line. The MSM never can be too far in the minority regardless of the truth as it decreases viewership.

 

Ever heard the term "you broke it you bought it?" You can't invade and leave a vacuum. That idea has been tried before and let's just say it didn't work out. Face it, our necessary invasion of Afghanistan put us in the business of nation building. Simple as that. I also hope your saying "just to respond to Bin Laden and 9/11" is in no way meant to minimize how significant an event that was. If a major league catastrophic terrorist event on our own soil isn't cause for invading a country like Afghanistan, then what is?

I didn't say they wouldn't be affected at all. I'm saying you are making assumptions based on wishful thinking. These extremists aren't new to the scene and I think you severely underestimate their ambitions. Your statement about the vast majority of muslims in these countries defeating the extremists is spot on! It is also true the idiotic invasion of Iraq has made this 100 times more difficult for the reason you state.

Huh? Yes, they are "evil doers" and yes they "hate our freedoms". You assume that if one believes this then one also believes there is "no need to reevaluate whether our actions make us hated or play into the beliefs of these extremist folks since they are just haters who would hate anyway". Very silly. You need to stop pigeon-holing others who don't share beliefs identical to yours. This is no different than the Bush-ites who used to lump everyone opposed to them into the "giving aid and comfort to the enemy" camp. Talk like this nukes reasonable discussion. The extremists are evil, bloodthirsty and whatever else one can think to call them but we ALSO must evaluate how our actions affect the picture.

So what straw man are you addressing with this statement? I don't know what you are talking about.

 

It's a big deal to Iraqis, and it would be a big deal to you if there was a car bomb found in your community. One of the goals of terrorism is to weaken the public's perception of the government's ability to maintain security. Without security, the concept of a nation's border becomes abstract.

Iraq could be seen as our overreaction to 9/11, but given Bush's reelection, there's no doubt many Americans felt safer immediately after toppling Saddam's regime than before. Since the Patriot Act is still around, I'll double down and say that has made many Americans feel safer as well.

There's many compelling arguments to the documentary I mentioned. One can say that in the era of a selfishly motivated society, fear can be the greatest catalyst to make people consent in unison to interests that usually counter their own under other circumstances. It doesn't matter if a car accident is a more likely cause of death than a terrorist act. Just like it doesn't matter if the casualties from a "dirty bomb" is almost as low as from a conventional bomb.

 

I think it is completely obvious that most Americans value a thousand American lives over say 1,000, 000 Iraqis. Not even a close call. . What still amazes me is that many of these same people proclaim constantly how Christian they are. It is certainly a different type of Christianity than I was raised in.

I guess it gets back to a paraphrase of a Howard Zinn quote: "The good thing about the American people is that you have to fool them into starting unjust foreign wars; the bad thing is that they are so easily fooled."

 

Your original premise was that Bush and the rest of the Republicans decided to invade Iraq with no provocation. They just willy nilly decided to go to war. Pelosi's comments show that this was a decision supported by both sides of the aisle.

Due to her position in Congress and the committee on which she served, I think it a safe assumption that she studied lots of information that we will never see prior to making her statements.

It is a convenient luxury to be able to sit here, 4 years after it all, and state that it was without provocation and dump the entire mess on a politician whom you do not like. It is simply an argument that is intellectually dishonest.

 

Did weak kneed Democrats and the Mainstream media go along out of fear of looking unpatriotic? Yes. Did Bush-Cheny skillfully create a mob atmosphere out of 911 to put opposition pols in this position. Yes. . More mainstream GOP'er like Bush's dad also opposed the war. You can't make the case that only "hatas" are putting the onus on Bush.

So you really think that there is all this still secret info that supported the decision to to to war with Iraq that has not been revealed? You mean Bush-Cheny have made a case using false and shoddy evidence, and kept the good stuff from us. Incredible. Why?

As far as 4 years afterward. The alternate info was available and many of us posted it at the time. Go back and read some of the press (mainly liberal and or libertarian, but some liberal columinsts in the MSM)that opposed the War. See also the statements of Bush I, Colon Powell and I believe even Cheney from Bush I's adminstration as to why they did not take over Iraq in the first Gulf War as they predicted with amazing accuracy the mess that has resulted.

 

Insofar as extremist muslim terrorism in England goes, there doesn't seem to be much point if they keep doing this badly. They did manage to get one good hit a couple of years ago, but this is definitely a B team working now. They couldn't blow up any of their cars or hurt anybody. They couldn't even kill themselves with a suicide attack. Just sad.

Thanks for that; good post.

 

excellent segue. seriously.

 

It shows the anger and also the weakness of these folks. These appear to be just ordinary non Al Qaeda type Muslims ticked off at our actions. It wouldn't surprise me if it was due to Iraq. The problem is that even bumbling amateurs can occasionally pull something off.

It would be interesting to know their motivation for these particular acts.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/07/02/london.alert/index.html

The suspects appear to be doctors looking for revenge due to the Iraq war. Don't think this had anything to do with religious extremism.

 

So you're saying it can't be 'political extremism'? Or is it 'religious extremism' because the perpetrators are Muslims? What if the terrorist-wanna-bes did what they did because they were 'pissed' at Britain being involved in wars against fellow Arabs or S.Asians or Muslims (as in some sort of ethnic kinship rather than religious motivation)?

There are so many possible dimensions here you're ignoring because you automatically presume that "religion" is involved to begin with.

 

I heard on the ABC News that one of the guys was trained in Iraq. However, I have yet to see anything about a clear connection to the Iraq War.

Apparently these guys are post 911 immigrants to Britain. Not long time residients.

It is looking more like Al Qaeda or some similar group.

 

Juan Cole has an interesting article on the motivation of these Mediclly trained terroirsts. At least one was an Iraqi. Sort of long, but worth it.
*******
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Monday, July 02, 2007

Jordanian & Iraqi Physicians behind UK Bombing


A cell made up of 7 medical personnel from Jordan and Iraq appears to have been behind the attempted bombing at Picadilly Circus on Friday and the actual car bombing at the Glasgow airport this weekend. One is a neurologist, Muhammad Asha, from Jordan. Another is an Iraqi physician, Bilal Abdulla. CNN is reporting that Asha's family back in Jordan is stunned. They are middle class, not religious, and intermarried with Christians.

Why would highly educated and relatively well off professionals behave this way? I think this sort of cell suggests that three kinds of sociological theory need to be synthesized in order to understand contemporary social movements-- Social constructivism, resource mobilization theory and European new social movement theory.

Here I'll just concentrate on one, social construction in the Jurgen Habermas (left) and the Peter Berger/ Thomas Luckmann (right) traditions. Groups construct life-worlds within which social action becomes plausible to them. This cell of highly networked professionals had developed a narrative about the world that required they do these horrible things. They weren't motivated by poverty, or class grievances. Their ideas came out of a logic of self and other, such that they likely included Fallujah in "self" and all British foreign policy in "other."

Gradually the shape of that narrative may emerge, though actually there are impediments to our understanding these hothouse terrorist ideologies. The perpetrators often kill themselves, taking most of the details with them. Mainstream media often are little interested in tracking down the details, and government spokesmen are positively eager to downplay or dispute the internal motivations of the criminals. All this is understandable, but it does law enforcement and the public discourse a disservice.

With regard to the 7/7/2005 underground bombings, one of the perpetrators, Shahzad Tanveer clearly was responding to what he saw as a vast Western/Indian conspiracy to massacre Muslims in Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iraq. The conspiracy-theory aspect of his thinking, which brought together disparate political struggles into a single over-arching plot, is typical of these violent ideologies. We know what he thought in part because journalists from local British newspapers in his home area went to Pakistan to seek out his relatives. But the enormous impact on him of the Iraq War was repeatedly denied by the Blair government.

It is too soon to know what exactly was the little lifeworld constructed by these expatriate physicians in Scotland. It could be al-Qaeda, it could just be garden variety Arab nationalism. Note that such extreme points of view thrive when small numbers of persons are in intensive social action within the group and somewhat isolated from their surroundings. They reinforce each other constantly, without encountering skepticism. (Outsiders would say "You believe what?") Medical personnel with odd hours, who hung out socially mainly with one another, and spoke Arabic with one another while not intensively discussing their ideas with Britons, would fit this profile. They may have received reinforcement from internet chat groups.

The kind of thinking they would be engaged in (I don't know details) would typically be, "Britain and the US are conducting a genocide against Arab Muslims in Iraq, are ethnically cleansing Fallujah, Baqubah, and Baghdad, and this must be stopped and cannot be borne. Something must be done, something dramatic, to draw the attention of an apathetic public to the kind of policies they are supporting."

The narrative will be one-sided, exaggerated, black-and-white, with pure heroes and black-hearted villains. Typically they were not upset when Saddam Hussein was massacring 300,000 Iraqis, or when the Talaban were massacring people in Mazar-i Sharif and Bamiyan. (Baathi or Salafi bombings of Shiites in Baghdad also likely do not disturb them). A foreign/indigenous dynamic informs their outrage, so that indigenous atrocities are not (as) objectionable as what are seen as imperial interventions.

And then there will be the leap to irrational and counter-productive violence against innocents. Putting gasoline cannisters in a car and setting it on fire in front of a dance club or an airport isn't likely to actually change policy. It was even amateurish terrorism, since they only managed to set themselves and their car on fire. I suggested yesterday that the Glasgow Airport operation seemed more focused on suicide than on killing others, though they may have hoped to take some passengers with them. Neither homicide nor suicide actually helps their cause. If the group wanted to change British policy, they could have become activists in politics and given money to the Liberal Democrat party. Indeed, terrorism has the effect of reinforcing right-wing policy.

Disrupting these small-network ideologies may not be easy. But it would be important to know which media they typically watched or engaged with (satellite television? Internet?) and to think of strategies for challenging the narratives in those realms. Impressing on British anti-imperialists that there are political avenues in open societies for changing policy, and that violence is counter-productive to their aims, would be important. Public service ads to this effect in Arabic and Urdu might be an idea.

I suspect that, however, a lot of these deviant ideologies are now being driven by the Iraq War and to some extent Afghanistan (see below), and that social peace in Europe may well require Western withdrawal from those countries.

Juan Cole.com

 

I really doubt that the attacks will stop after withdrawal.

Which is what makes this such a conundrum.

 

This is why I think the Iraq war was such a HUGE blunder:

before that these people had pretty weak reasons to be pissed at us, i mean OMG our girls show their midriffs and we have a small military base in Saudi Arabia, big deal.

It would be pretty hard for bin laden and co to convince the avg joe off the street to give his life to kill for that narrative.

Now however, they have tons of material on us, I mean literally, tons.

They can convince people that we are taking their oil, they can just show pictures of abu gharib (sp), they can show pictures of iraqi women and children killed or maimed in the war, they can say that we can be defeated now because we look weak in Iraq.

Sadly, I feel like his ranks are swelling, and I think in the next decade or so we are going to see a lot more of this stuff going down.