Antony Wright: Achieving Justice And Finding Peace

With the whole of the London Transport system suspended I found myself trapped in the city. To get home tonight I purchased a bicycle, well I had been threatening to do so for some time, and as I rode up the side of the steep valley that surrounds the centre of London I had time to reflect on my good fortune. I had escaped death because a bomb was not on my train but on the train behind me, and now I was going home to my wonderful wife and my four young children.

Somewhere, I thought to myself, there is a husband or wife sitting by the phone with no news of their loved one, with the whirlwind of children in background moaning for their dinner and asking 'when is Mummy or Daddy going to be home?' Little do they know that their entire world is going to come crashing down around them later tonight when the police come knocking at their door.

However these morbid daydreams are not new to me, for a long time I have been haunted by them.

Like the group of children at the end of a dusty alley. Its hot and dry and the Basra sun is beating down on their uncle, who later I will have the honour to meet, as he watches them play. One of them kicks a football high into the sky and as the children look up to follow its trajectory the last thing they see is the precision guided missile hurtling towards them.

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And the 5 year old girl travelling in a car with her father, suddenly the car spins out of control and into a ditch. The girl recovering from her concussion looks up to see American solders surrounding her car, screaming and shouting in a language she doesn't understand. Then she looks across to her father, slumped across the steering wheel, the back of his head missing.

Or the slight 13-year-old schoolgirl on her way to school, a building pockmarked by bullets. She is shot in the leg, drops her schoolbag, turns, tries to hobble away, and falls. Four or five soldiers emerge from a nearby army post and shoot at her from a distance. The Platoon commander moves in closer to put two bullets in her head. He then walks away, turns back and fires a stream of bullets into her body. She has at least 17 wounds and much of her head is destroyed.

I've often wandered if Tony Blair has similar thoughts. Judging by his ham acting today it would take a lot to convince me he does. In a speech which was nothing but a series of platitudes he said "It is through terrorism that the people that have committed this terrible act express their values, and it is right at this moment that we demonstrate ours. I think we all know what they are trying to do - they are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cower us, to frighten us out of doing the things that we want to do, of trying to stop us going about our business as normal, as we are entitled to do, and they should not, and they must not, succeed."

So they want to cower us, stop us doing the things we want to do, stop us going about our business as usual and we should continue to express our values. Are you like me? Does listening to our politicians and media pundits make you feel like you just don't get it.

Have no fear you are not mad, Tony Blair's words really don't make any sense. If you are looking for clarity then look no further than the group that has claimed responsibility, they have been helpful enough to spell out why they committed these disgusting acts. In short they say it was "In response to the massacres that Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan, the heroic holy warriors have undertaken a blessed raid (ghazwah)in London."

Well you can't get any clearer than that, I only wish Tony Blair would be so lucid then all could see both sides for the psychopaths that they are.

Michael Scheuer, the former CIA Bin Laden analyst today said that "chickens were coming home to roost" for US and UK politicians who had obscured the nature of the al-Qaeda struggle by maintaining that the organization attacks the West because "they hate our values."

Of course this obfuscation by Tony Blair should be no surprise to us, as we now know that he lied in order to take the UK into an illegal war in Iraq in the full knowledge that it would increase the chances of a terrorist attack .

We are taught that in order to win a fight we must know our enemy, sometimes when we do that and look back at ourselves through the eyes of others we have to turn away because the vision is just too awful.

With London now added to the roll call along with New York, the Pentagon, Madrid, Bali, Nairobi and Riyadh the 'war on terror' can only be described as a failure. Perhaps it is only when we add Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt and the rest to the roll call that we are going to achieve justice and find peace.

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