July 23, 2005
Red Ken, reality-based politician
Amid the chaos of Thursday’s London bombings, I missed this Wednesday interview with Ken Livingstone about the July 7 attacks, the West, and Islam:
Asked on Wednesday what he thought had motivated the four suspected suicide bombers, Livingstone cited Western policy in the Middle East and early American backing for Osama bin Laden.
“A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in (U.S. detention camp) Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn’t a just foreign policy,” he said.
… “You’ve just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of a Western need for oil. We’ve propped up unsavory governments, we’ve overthrown ones that we didn’t consider sympathetic,” Livingstone said.
“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 to 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,” he told BBC radio.
Blair, amazingly, continues to maintain that this month’s bombings have nothing to do with the Iraq war or British foreign policy.
A poll this week found that two-thirds of Britons disagree.
Posted by Stephen at 12:14 AM in Terrorism | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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