The Islamic terrorists do not want to invade, conquer and occupy the west. They don’t want to “destroy our free way of life”. We are just a means to an end for them. What they want to do is to take over power in corrupt, secular Arab dictatorships i.e. Iraq with Saddam in power, Saudi Arabia etc., and replace the secular dictators with Islamic theocratic dictators with a perverted, medieval, fundamentalist form of Islam.
They currently don’t have the military capability to take over these states, so their strategy is to provoke Western governments to over react and brutalize, kill and humiliate Muslims in Western and Middle Eastern countries so that Al Qaeda will gain new recruits, supporters and sympathizers. Then they can destabilize and overthrow the corrupt Arab regimes and take power.
The British govt. is bright enough to realize this as you can see in Tony Blair’s and London Mayor’s Ken Livingstone’s statements.
Unfortunately George Bush and his band of ideologues are not bright enough to realize this. The torture in Guantanamo and in Abu Ghraib is exactly the best way to add new recruits, sympathizers and resources to Bin Laden’s movement. It’s almost like George Bush is on Bin Laden’s payroll.
Don’t get me wrong. The people who set off those bombs in London are fully responsible for their actions, full stop. They should be hunted down and either brought to trial or killed, full stop.
It’s just that through American military and political ignorance, arrogance and incompetence in Iraq, Bush is breeding a training ground for a new generation of foreign jihadis. (I’m not talking about the domestic resistance to the US occupation). And if you read the reports they’re getting more creative, resourceful, effective and deadly.
What will happen if the US eventually leaves and an Iraqi govt. fully takes over? Will those foreign fighters just go back home to their shops or farms? Or will they decide to go and use their bomb making skills somewhere else?