Al-Qaida wants to conquer Iraq, not avenge the war

One of the lazier thoughts in wide circulation since the London bombings is that they were retaliation for the Iraq war: 'We attacked them, so they attacked us'. But there are two huge begged questions here: the identities of 'them' and of 'us'.

This is what happened. The UK government took part in invading and then occupying Iraq. The aim was to topple the Saddam regime and install a more 'acceptable' one. While Saddam's brutality is beyond dispute, so is the fact that the invasion and occupation have killed many innocent Iraqi civilians.

Two years later, a small group of terrorists, some British and (apparently) none Iraqi, killed 52 innocent civilians in London. The murder was indiscriminate: victims were not targeted for anything they had done or said or believed. No verifiable statement of intent has been issued by those involved, but it seems an entirely fair assumption that they had al-Qaida-type motives. If so, the method - uncompromising violence – manifests the same casual hatred as the objective: domination.

Fanatics of this ilk are not angry that Saddam was deposed; or at least, it is deeply disingenuous anger if they are. The secular Ba'athist regime was prominent on bin Laden's hate list (the fact that the two were enemies was one of the many reasons why the claims of a link between Iraq and 9/11 were so preposterous).

However, Saddam was overthrown not by a fundamentalist uprising but by decadent Western infidels. And unlike some on the anti-imperialist left, bin Laden does not live in the moral vacuum of thinking that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend'. Rather, he subscribes to the terrible doctrine that 'you're either with us (on everything) or against us'. That's what fundamentalism is.

Of course, bin Laden, like all canny political operators, is happy to tactically broaden his tent. He shows no shame in co-opting the suffering of a predominantly Shia population to his cause, while loathing Shi'ites as the greatest apostates of all.

And this is the point: the terrorists do not have the welfare of the Iraqi people at heart. Not the ones who bombed London; not the ones who bomb Iraq daily, targeting Iraqis far more than they do US or UK forces. They are not a proxy national liberation movement. They want to impose a tyrannical theocracy on the people of Iraq and other Muslim nations, or even the whole world.

There is in fact little room for doubt that British policy on Iraq was one major reason that the terrorists chose to bomb London. (Yes, they chose to, freely. Tony Blair did not plant microchips in their brains, programming them to kill.) We just have to consider their likely political aims and rationale.

It is not absurd to have thought, given the aftermath of the Madrid attack, that bombing London could have turned the British people against the occupation of Iraq and hastened a government decision to withdraw. The terrorists presumably believe that this would help in achieving their aims: derailing the tentative process of Iraqi democracy and forming a Taliban-style regime there by force. It is notable that the Iraqi army is currently far less able to deal with 'insurgents' than US and UK troops are.

So who here is 'us'? Who is 'them'? Which aggressors can intelligibly be said to be represented by the people killed in London? And which victims can the London bombers intelligibly be said to be retaliating on behalf of?

Neither equation holds up. The bombings were very probably a reaction, in large part, to British policy – but as a cynical and callous way to bend Iraq to bin Laden's will, not as a gasp of understandable fury and despair from the 'Arab street'.