"jim rozen" wrote in message
...
In article , RAM^3 says...

Has it? Where is the followup attack to 9/11 in the US?

7/7 in London.

I think this was where I came it. Dave said it was
"beneath me" to point this out. Our efforts in
iraq no matter how splendid at spending our tax
dollars have not stopped terrorism at all.

They seem to be concentrating all the insurgents
instead, so they can attend postgraduate terrorism
school in the universtity that we ourselves have
created.

Jim




Jim,
Have a look at this. You get a little sense of the history involved.

"The time of revenge has come"
Blowback from Bush and Blair's incompetently pursued war on terror has hit
London. When will the U.S. figure out how to fight smart?

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Juan Cole

July 8, 2005 | Credit for the horrific bombings of the London Underground
and a double-decker bus on Thursday morning was immediately taken on a
radical Muslim Web site by a "secret group" of Qaida al-Jihad in Europe. By
Thursday afternoon, as the casualty toll rose above 40 dead and 700 wounded,
British Foreign Minister Jack Straw was saying, "It has the hallmarks of an
al-Qaida-related attack." Although U.S. President George W. Bush maintains
that al-Qaida strikes out at the industrialized democracies because of
hatred for Western values, the statement said nothing of the sort. The
attack, the terrorists proclaimed, was an act of sacred revenge for British
"massacres" in "Afghanistan and Iraq," and a punishment of the United
Kingdom for its "Zionism" (i.e., support of Israel). If they really are
responsible, who is this group and what do they want?

The phrase "Qaida al-Jihad" refers to the 2001 decision made by Ayman
al-Zawahiri, a leader of the Egyptian terrorist group al-Jihad al-Islami, to
merge his organization into bin Laden's al-Qaida ("the Base"). The joint
organization was thus renamed Qaida al-Jihad, the "Base for Holy War."
(Zawahiri and bin Laden had allied in 1998.) The group claiming
responsibility for the London bombings represents itself as a secret,
organized grouping or cell of "Qaida al-Jihad in Europe." It is significant
that they identify themselves as "in Europe," suggesting that they are based
on the continent and have struck from there into London. This conclusion is
bolstered by their description of the attack as a "blessed raid." One raids
a neighboring territory, not one's own. Whether this group carried out the
attack or not, the sentiments they express do exist among the radical fringe
and form a continued danger. Jihadi internet bulletin boards expressed
skepticism about the group, and pointed to an inaccuracy in the quotation
from the Quran. But al-Qaida wannabes are often engineers without good
Arabic or Islamics training.

Most probably, then, this group consists of a small (and previously obscure)
expatriate Muslim network somewhere in continental Europe, which has decided
to announce its allegiance to Qaida al-Jihad. It is highly unlikely that
al-Qaida itself retains enough command and control to plan or order such
operations. They could have found many cues in al-Qaida literature, however,
that London should be attacked.

The United Kingdom had not been a target for al-Qaida in the late 1990s. But
in October 2001, bin Laden threatened the United Kingdom with suicide
aircraft attacks if it joined in the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. In
November of 2002, bin Laden said in an audiotape, "What do your governments
want from their alliance with America in attacking us in Afghanistan? I
mention in particular Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and
Australia." In February of 2003, as Bush and Blair marched to war in Iraq,
bin Laden warned that the U.K. as well as the U.S. would be made to pay. In
October of 2003, bin Laden said of the Iraq war, "Let it be known to you
that this war is a new campaign against the Muslim world," and named Britain
as a target for reprisals. A month later, an al-Qaida-linked group detonated
bombs in Istanbul, targeting British sites and killing the British
vice-consul. Although bin Laden offered several European countries,
including Britain, a truce in April of 2004 if they would withdraw from
Afghanistan and Iraq, the deadline for the end of the truce ended in
mid-July of that year.

Ayman al-Zawahiri recently issued a videotape, excerpts of which appeared on
al-Jazeera on June 17, which stressed the need for violent action as opposed
to participation in political reform. True reform, he said, must be based on
three premises: The rule of Islamic law, liberating the lands of Islam from
the Occupier, and the freedom of the Islamic community in managing its own
affairs. He thundered that "expelling the marauder Crusader and Jewish
forces cannot be done through demonstrations and hoarse voices."
Al-Zawahiri's videotapes have often been issued just before major terrorist
actions, and some analysts believe that they are intended as cues for when
they should be undertaken. Abdel Bari Atwan, the London editor of the Arab
newspaper al-Quds, warned that the appearance of the tape signaled an
imminent attack.

The communiqué on the London bombing is unusual in appealing both to the
Muslim community and to the "community of Arabism." "Urubah," or Arabism, is
a secular nationalist ideal. The diction suggests that the bombers are from
a younger generation of activists who have not lived in non-Arab Muslim
countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, and think of Arabism and Islam
as overlapping rather than alternatives to one another. The text makes
relatively few references to religion, reading more as a statement of Muslim
nationalism than of piety.

In accordance with al-Zawahiri's focus on violence as the answer to the
"marauding" of occupying non-Muslim armies in Muslim lands, the statement
condemns what it calls "massacres" by "Zionist" British troops in Iraq and
Afghanistan, both of them Muslim lands under Western military occupation
(and, it is implied, similar in this regard to Gaza and the West Bank under
Israeli control). These bombings, it says, are a form of revenge for these
alleged predations. The language of revenge recalls tribal feuds rather than
Islamic values.

The terrorists refer to the bombings, which they say they carefully planned
over a long period, as a "blessed raid." They are recalling the struggle
between the wealthy, pagan trading entrepot, Mecca, and the beleaguered,
persecuted Muslim community in Medina in early seventh century west Arabia.
The Muslims around the Prophet Mohammed responded to the Meccan
determination to wipe them out by raiding the caravans of their wealthy
rivals, depriving them of their profits and gradually strangling them. The
victorious Muslims, having cut the idol-worshipping Meccan merchants off,
marched into the city in 630. Al-Qaida teaches its acolytes that great
Western metropolises such as New York and London are the Meccas of this age,
centers of paganism, immorality and massive wealth, from which plundering
expeditions are launched against hapless, pious Muslims. This symbology
helps explain why the City of London subway stops were especially targeted,
since it is the economic center of London. A "raid" such as the Muslim
bombings is considered not just a military action but also a religious
ritual.

If the communiqué of Qaida al-Jihad in Europe proves authentic, the London
bombings are the second major instance of terrorism in Europe directly
related to the Iraq war. In March of 2004, the Moroccan Islamic Combatant
Group (French acronym: GICM) launched a massive attack on trains in Madrid
in order to punish Spain for its participation in the U.S.-led coalition in
Iraq, following on their bombing of Casablanca the previous year.

From the point of view of a serious counterinsurgency campaign against
al-Qaida, Bush has made exactly the wrong decisions all along the line. He
decided to "unleash" Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rather than
pressing for Israeli-Palestinian peace and an end to Israeli occupation of
the territories it captured in 1967. Rather than extinguishing this most
incendiary issue for Arabs and Muslims, he poured gasoline on it. His
strategy in response to Sept. 11 was to fight the Afghanistan War on the
cheap. By failing to commit American ground troops in Tora Bora, he allowed
bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to escape. He reneged on promises to rebuild
Afghanistan and prevent the reemergence of the Taliban and al-Qaida there,
thus prolonging the U.S. and NATO military presence indefinitely. He then
diverted most American military and reconstruction resources into an illegal
war on Iraq. That war may have been doomed from the beginning, but Bush's
refusal to line up international support, and his administration's criminal
lack of planning for the postwar period, made failure inevitable.

Conservative commentators argue that Iraq is a "fly trap" for Muslim
terrorists. It makes much more sense to think of it as bin Laden's fly trap
for Western troops. There, jihadis can kill them (making the point that they
are not invulnerable), and can provoke reprisals against Iraqi civilians
that defame the West in the Muslim world. After Abu Ghraib and Fallujah,
many Muslims felt that Bin Laden's dire warnings to them that the United
States wanted to occupy their countries, rape their women, humiliate their
men, and steal their assets had been vindicated.

These claims were not credited by most of the world's Muslims before the
Iraq war. Opinion polls show that most of the world's Muslims have great
admiration for democracy and many other Western values. They object to the
U.S. and the U.K. because of their policies, not their values. Before Bush,
for instance, the vast majority of Indonesians felt favorably toward the
United States. Even after a recent bounce from U.S. help with tsunami
relief, only about a third now do.

The global anti-insurgency battle against al-Qaida must be fought smarter if
the West is to win. To criminal investigations and surveillance must be
added a wiser set of foreign policies. Long-term Western military occupation
of Afghanistan and Iraq is simply not going to be acceptable to many in the
Muslim world. U.S. actions at Abu Ghraib and Fallujah created powerful new
symbols of Muslim humiliation that the jihadis who sympathize with al-Qaida
can use to recruit a new generation of terrorists. The U.S. must act as an
honest broker in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And Bush and
Blair must urgently find a credible exit strategy from Iraq that can
extricate the West from bin Laden's fly trap.

Chicago political scientist Robert Pape argues in his new book, "Dying to
Win," that the vast majority of suicide bombers are protesting foreign
military occupation undertaken by democratic societies where public opinion
matters. He points out that there is no recorded instance of a suicide
attack in Iraq in all of history until the Anglo-American conquest of that
country in 2003. He might have added that neither had any bombings been
undertaken elsewhere in the name of Iraq.

George Bush is sure to try to use the London bombings to rally the American
people to support his policies. If Americans look closer, however, they will
realize that Bush's incompetent crusade has made the world more dangerous,
not less.


--
John R. Carroll
Machining Solution Software, Inc.
Los Angeles San Francisco
www.machiningsolution.com