Who would have thought when I wrote this that six years later a leading contender for nominee as Republican U.S. presidential candidate would be arguing the same thing in his campaign.
He sums up the problem with U.S. foreign policy nicely: “We don’t mind our own business!”
Fun fact: U.S. military veterans have given more money to Ron Paul’s campaign than all the other campaigns put together.
Jason Burke’s Osama bin Laden obituary for The Guardian perpetuates the myth that the Taliban never offered to hand Bin Laden over:
Faced with an ultimatum, the Taliban again refused to surrender Bin Laden, who initially denied involvement, and an American-led aerial bombing campaign followed.
In fact the Taliban publicly offered in October of 2001 to hand Osama bin Laden over to a third country, provided the U.S. halted the illegal bombing of Afghanistan and produced the necessary evidence about involvement of Bin Laden or any of his associates in the 11 September attacks. Would they have gone through with the offer? We’ll never know because Bush rejected it, putting an end to any possibility of a potentially peaceful, legal resolution to the events of 11 September 2001, and opened up the way for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, along with the millions who have lost their lives or had them destroyed as a result.
Update: Jason Burke says he’ll correct obituary.
Under his and Blair’s leadership the economy tanks. What does he do? Blatantly tries to divert attention by screaming “War on Terror.” Little more than a propaganda tool to take away the freedoms of the people of Britain.
“The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign — over 95 percent of all the incidents — has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.”
According to Jack Straw, in response to George Galloway’s quite reasonable point that the cowardly attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq increased the threat of terrorist attack in Britain, “People have to remember that 11 September was in 2001 before the military action.” This cheap little chunk of self-deluded spin is an attempt to weave the story that the September 11 attacks came out of the blue.