Ten years ago to the day, I awoke in an upscale hotel room in Charing Cross, London -- directly across from the Nelson Monument and Trafalgar Square. I was in the United Kingdom to promote my book, Iraq Confidential, which had just been published by I.B. Taurus. It was part of a larger tour which saw me speak at the Make Poverty History rally in Edinburgh, Scotland, on July 2, on the eve of the G-8 Summit, address a crowd of anti-war protestors outside the giant US eavesdropping facility Menwith Hill, in North Yorkshire, on July 4, and speak to audiences at universities in Leeds, Oxford and London. The tour was to conclude with speaking events at two prestigious venues -- the Royal Institute of International Affairs, better known as Chatham House, and the Royal United Services Institute.
The Chatham House event was scheduled for the afternoon of July 7. I was in London for a few days, and I had decided to make the most of it. I had been conducting (and continue to conduct) historical research into anti-Soviet resistance in Central Asia in the early 20 century, and wanted to take advantage of the considerable archives located at the British Library. I had also contacted a Member of Parliament I knew to see if she could arrange a tour of a London Fire Brigade station (I was at the time an active member in my local volunteer fire department.) I took one look at the crowd heading into the Charing Cross station of the London Underground. It was 8.45 in the morning, and I had wanted to be at the British Library by the time it opened at 9.30. I quickly opted to take a cab. The ride itself was uneventful until we approached Euston. As a fire buff, I was always alert to the presence of fire apparatus, and I noticed several engines, lights and sirens active, passing us on the road. As the cab passed the Euston underground station, traffic came to a halt. There were crowds of people in the median, and smoke could be seen coming from vents near the station entrance. A pair of fire engines were parked on the curb.
"There must be an accident in the tube," the driver said. He pointed out that the British Library was only a few blocks away, and that I might make better time walking from here. I looked at my watch -- it was 9.40; I was already late. I thanked him, paid my fare, and headed down a street toward the library. As I started to cross the road at Tavistock Square, I heard a "pop" to my right, and was suddenly engulfed by a surge of people, with uniformed Bobbies calmly but sternly telling the crowd, myself included, to "Move away, now."
Like the rest of London that morning, I was oblivious to the tragedy that had been unfolding around us. The "pop" I had heard had been the sound of Hasib Hussain, the 18-year old son of Pakistani immigrants, detonating a backpack bomb on the upper deck of a London city bus, killing himself and 13 others. Germain Lindsay, a 19-year old immigrant from Jamaica who recently converted to Islam, had exploded a similar device onboard a Piccadilly Line train (the very line I would have been on had I opted to ride the tube), taking the lives of 26 people in addition to his own. It was the smoke from this explosion that I had seen wafting from the Euston underground station. Two other suicide bombers struck two more underground trains, bringing the total number of casualties to 52 civilians dead, with more than 700 wounded.
I joined thousands of other stranded commuters in a long walk through London, heading to work, home or, in my case, back to my hotel. Cell phone service was out throughout London, so I was uncertain as to what was happening with regard to the Chatham House speaking event. I headed to 10 St. James Square, where I found my hosts and a handful of invited guests waiting. We decided that the original meeting would be rescheduled for another day because of the day's tragic events, but I agreed to participate in an informal gathering that afternoon in Chatham House involving the dozen or so people who had, like me, arrived not knowing what impact the terror attacks would have on the schedule.
While the meeting at Chatham House was supposed to be centered on my book, Iraq Confidential, and the issue of disarming Iraq, invariably the events of that morning drove the conversation toward the topic of terrorism and the linkage, if any, between American (and, by extension, British) foreign policy and the decision by individuals such as those who perpetrated the London bombings to resort to terror. This was a topic familiar to me -- I had spoken on this very subject earlier in the week in my presentations in both Edinburgh and Menwith Hill, warning the audience that British complicity in the American invasion and occupation of Iraq could very well have consequences similar in scope and scale to the 9/11 attacks on the United States. This line of argument was fleshed out in more detail at Chatham House, with some participants feeling it was too soon to draw cause and effect relationships between the bombings (details of which were still murky at the time) and specific foreign policy decisions, and others concurring that some sort of blow-back was inevitable, even if it could not be concluded at this juncture that the events of 7/7 represented such.
I had long been warning about the potential for backlash against unsound policies in the Middle East. Prior to September 11, 2001, a cornerstone of my public presentations was the link between radical Islam-inspired terrorism and American policies that subjected millions of innocent civilians to suffering and death. My focus had been on Iraq, the impact of economic sanctions on the Iraqi people, and what this meant in terms of engendering lasting hostility on the part of the Iraqi people and other Arabs/Muslims toward the United States. I was perhaps most prescient, and pointed, at an event held at the University of Texas Permian Basin's John Ben Sheppard Institute, on October 5, 2000, appropriately titled "Foreign Policy & The Threat Of Domestic Terrorism: Can Americans Feel Secure?"
I spoke on a panel that included Robert Gates (the former CIA Director, and future Secretary of State and Defense), Richard Haas (former Director of Policy for the State Department, and current President of the Council of Foreign Relations), and Terry Waite (the British Church of England envoy held hostage for four years in Lebanon.) I took vociferous issue with both Gates and Haas over their depiction of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, noting that America's policies of regime change were the sole source of the continued suffering of the Iraqi people, that millions of Muslims around the world were drawing on this suffering when formulating their opinion of America and Americans, and that sooner or later the mistakes engendered by this policy would come home to roost in the form of attacks on American soil. Needless to say Robert Gates and Richard Haas (both architects of the policy I was attacking) disagreed, opting to blame Saddam Hussein for all that ailed the region (Terry Waite was ambivalent on the subject.)
Iraq as the root cause of terror has been a common theme -- both George W. Bush and Tony Blair drew on that argument in justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But those who decried Saddam Hussein's government as a force of regional and global instability are loath to take this argument to its logical conclusion -- that the actions undertaken by the United States and Great Britain in response to Saddam Hussein are likewise a major motivation of radical Islamists such as those who attacked the United States on 9/11 and London on 7/7. Tony Blair, in a recent interview with the BBC, denied any linkage between the British participation in the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the attacks of 7/7, the words of the attackers notwithstanding (Shehzad Tanweer, one of the bombers, recorded a videotape in which he stated "What you have witnessed now is only the beginning of a string of attacks that will continue and become stronger until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq.") American political leaders have shown a similar intellectual blindness in decrying any linkage between American policy and acts of terror.
The presence of such blinders on those responsible for the formulation of foreign policy in both London and Washington, DC is disturbing, especially in the context of the ongoing debate over how the United States, Great Britain and others should respond to the ISIS phenomenon. "There will always be reasons and excuses that people use for terrorism," Tony Blair told the BBC when asked if he bore some culpability for the 7/7 attacks because of his Iraq policy. "In the end, the responsibility has got to lie with the people who carry this out and with those who encourage them," he said. Creating a gap between policy and terror allows one to live the illusion that there is no moral equivalency between "civilized" governments, such as the United States and Great Britain, and the forces of evil which conduct terror attacks like 9/11 and 7/7.
Such thinking belongs to the theater of the absurd, since it fails to address real issues in a meaningful way. It is not important what America and Great Britain think the motivations of those who commit acts of terror are -- it is only important what the perpetrators themselves think. Policy formulated in a vacuum of fact is doomed to fail, and any effort to solve a problem without first accurately defining that problem solves nothing. If one discussed the morality of a policy that killed millions of innocent Iraqi civilians (i.e., sanctions) or thousands of innocent Afghans (i.e., American drone strikes and aerial bombing) with the actual victims, the result would be the same as if one discussed the issue of morality with the victims of the terrorist attacks in London and the United States -- mindless violence against innocents, whether perpetrated by a government, group or individual, is immoral, period.
I didn't get to take my tour of a London Fire Brigade station on the evening of July 7 -- the firefighters were still involved in dealing with the consequences of the attack. I did get to spend time the next day with the crew of a rescue truck based out of Euston that had been among the first to respond to the scene of the attack at Russell Square, and later with an engine crew from SoHo that was first in at King's Station. There was no politics involved in our talk, just the straight-forward insights of men and women who had stared unspeakable tragedy in the face. There was a decided lack of the kind of chest thumping, vitriolic revenge mongering one would have witnessed in the United States under similar circumstances. Neither these firefighters nor the civilians they were aiding were responsible for the policies that the terrorists drew upon for their motivation in attacking. But the same could be said of the innocent victims of American and British bombings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria -- they were not behind the actions of ISIS, Al Qaeda or the Taliban that the air strikes were responding to. Violence creates a vicious cycle, where one act leads to another, and so on and so forth. This maxim should be kept in mind as policy toward ISIS and other groups is being formulated. It is not the politicians who will bear the consequences of such policy, but rather the civilians and first responders who come to their aid when the inevitable blow-back strikes home. Just ask the firefighters of London.