BBC NEWS: London Mayor speaks out and blames Western Middle East policy for extremist attacks

BBC

London Mayor speaks out and blames Western Middle East policy for extremist attacks

Decades of British and American intervention in the oil-rich Middle East motivated the London bombers, Ken LivingstoneMayor of London suggested. The London mayor told BBC News he had no sympathy with the bombers and he opposed all violence. But he argued that the attacks would not have happened had Western powers left Arab nations free to decide their own affairs after World War I. Instead, they had often supported unsavoury governments in the region. Mr Livingstone was asked on BBC Radio 4's Today programme what he thought had motivated the bombers. He replied: "I think you've just had 80 years of western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the western need for oil. "We've propped up unsavoury governments, we've overthrown ones we didn't consider sympathetic. "And I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s... the Americans recruited and trained Osama Bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan. "They didn't give any thought to the fact that once he'd done that he might turn on his creators." He attacked double standards by Western nations, such as the initial welcome given when Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq. There was also the "running sore" of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. "A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn't a just foreign policy," said Mr Livingstone. "Under foreign occupation and denied the right to vote, denied the right to run your own affairs, often denied the right to work for three generations, I suspect that if it had happened here in England, we would have produced a lot of suicide bombers ourselves." Mr Livingstone also criticised parts of the media for giving too much publicity to certain figures who were "totally unrepresentative" of British Muslims. Another British politician noted: "It is time for Tony Blair to get us out of Iraq, not because of extremist pressure, but because Tony Blair and Mr. Bush lied to us about the reasons for going to war in the first place."