Armed Police officer looks through his weapon on London Bridge as the attack broke out. Dominic Lipinski/PA Images. All rights reserved.At this stage in the ‘game’, 16 years since 9/11 ushered in the US-led ‘war on terror’– with multiple attacks now occurring across Europe and multiple wars across the MENA region – it is time for everyone in the west to start to reflect far more deeply on these matters. Whilst the attacks should be condemned, and sympathies expressed for the bereaved, these ritual condemnations, however important, will not help address the ways in which terrorism has become interwoven with western foreign policy objectives and those of its allies in the Middle East. Simplistic and politicised representations pitting ‘Islamic fundamentalist terrorism’ against ‘the west’ are wholly inadequate and are belied by facts.
So what do we now know? First, and perhaps most remarkably, the foundational event of the ‘war on terror’, the 9/11 attacks, do not appear to have kicked off a thorough and uncompromising strategy to deal with Al Qaeda. In fact, within days of 9/11, the British embassy in Washington was reporting that the “ ‘regime-change hawks in Washington [were] arguing that a coalition put together for one purpose (against international terrorism) could be used to clear up other problems in the region” (see Chilcot, 3.1 p.324).
Within weeks Blair and Bush were discussing multiple regime change operations in countries unconnected with the kind of terrorism understood to be behind Al Qaeda and 9/11.
