WHEN LOUISE BARRY, the Australian whose neck was broken in the explosion on the bus in London, took the oppportumity to ask John Howard at his bedside visit, “What do you think about all this sort of stuff then. Do you reckon, because everyone says that it’s all about because of the Iraq War. Do you reckon?”, she articulated a question many people ask.

Howard replied: “No, I don’t. But, you know, different people have different views. I don’t. I mean, they had a go at us and they had a go at other people before Iraq started.”

It doesn’t matter what John Winston Howard believes are the reasons for the London or any other suicide bombings. To argue that al Quaida used suicide bombers in terrorists attacks against us before Australia committed to Iraq is to miss what the terrorists’ point of view is.

The British Home Office conducted a detailed survey of the attitudes of the 1.6 million Muslims living in Britain 15 months ago, and found that, while 85 per cent condemned suicide terrorism, 13 per cent believed that more suicide attacks against the US and the West were justified.

That’s 208,000 people from whom recruits could be drawn. Did any of the 4 British nationals who became bombers give a damn what John Winston Howard thought.

The survey went further to identify the specific reason: Iraq. In other words, the principal factor driving support for suicide terrorism among British Muslims was not an evil ideology, but deep anger over British military policies on the Arabian Peninsula.

This may not be the breakdown of views of Muslims living in Australia but it’s a big ask to believe 100% oppose more suicide attacks against the US and the West.

The Bali bombings in October 2002 had an al-Qaeda link through the connections between the jihadist terrror groups. Months before the Bali attack, a mid-level al-Qaeda leader met Indonesian terrorist groups to ask them to recruit local Indonesians for suicide attacks to punish Australia for sending combat troops to Afghanistan and to deter Australian forces from going to Iraq.

Nightclubs for attack

The al-Qaeda operative selected the nightclubs for attack and paid $26,000 for the mission, while Indonesians angry at Australia’s military operations in East Timor carried it out.

The Prime Minister is right, he cannot say for certain that similar attacks will not take place in Australia. He volunteered the possibility of suicide bombers striking here on the ABC’s 7.30 Report.

Is a strike in Australia, following a 3 year commitment to Iraq and a recommitment to Afghanistan unconnected, simply a hate of modernity and the west?.

Following the appearance at Barry’s bedside Howard allowed an interview in which he said: “These people are opposed to what we believe in and what we stand for, far more than what we do. If you imagine that you can buy immunity from fanatics by curling yourself in a ball, apologising for the world —  to the world —  for who you are and what you stand for and what you believe in, not only is that morally bankrupt, but it’s also ineffective.”

In Howard’s view it is because of who we have become, what we stand for that make a terror attack unstoppable. However, it is not our responsibility, it’s the fanatics.

“Because fanatics despise a lot of things and the things they despise most is weakness and timidity. There has been plenty of evidence through history that fanatics attack weakness and retreating people even more savagely than they do defiant people.”

And so to reinforce the point of his alliance with the US, we are protected from attack by being in Iraq and returning to Afghanistan. That commitment does not appear to have been a successful strategy for Britain. What Britain has stood for appears to be the major factor influencing 13% of Britain’s Muslims.

Professor Robert Pape, political scientist at the University of Chicago and author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism has studied every suicide terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004. He states:

“More than half of all suicide attacks were carried out by secular groups and individuals. In fact, the world’s leader in suicide terrorism was the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist group that is completely secular and that recruits from Hindus. More than a third of all suicide attacks by Muslims were also carried out by secular groups, such as the Kurdish PKK in Turkey and the Communist Party in Lebanon.

Suicide terrorists

What more than 95 per cent of all suicide terrorist attacks around the world have in common is not religion, but a specific political goal to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, the central objective of every suicide terrorist campaign since 1980 has been to compel a democratic state with military forces on territory that the terrorists prize to take those forces out.

Although terrorist leaders may harbour other goals, history shows that the presence of foreign combat forces is the principal recruiting tool used by terrorist leaders to mobilise suicide terrorists to kill us.

In the early 1990s, the US abandoned its traditional policy in the Persian Gulf and shifted to the sustained presence of tens of thousands of combat forces, thousands of tanks, and hundreds of fighters on the Arabian Peninsula. Since then, Osama bin Laden has given numerous speeches to mobilise terrorists against the US. Many are entitled “The American occupation of the Arabian Peninsula”, and typically begin with pages of detailed description of American and Western combat operations on this land.

From 1995 to 2004, there were a total of 71 al-Qaeda suicide terrorists —  that is, 71 individuals who actually killed themselves to carry out al-Qaeda’s attacks. More than two-thirds were nationals from Sunni Muslim countries where the US has stationed combat troops since 1990: Saudi Arabia, other states on the Arabian Peninsula, Turkey, and Afghanistan.

Even the one-third of al-Qaeda suicide attackers that are more transnational in nature are powerfully motivated by anger over Western combat operations on the Arabian Peninsula. Thus, the al-Qaeda group that claimed responsibility for the London attacks said they were to punish Britain for British military operations in Iraq.”

So there it is, an analysis, free from Australian domestic political needs.

Whilst Australia had a strong motive to destroy the Taliban government of Afghanistan, Aussies were killed in the twin towers and al Quaida was resident in our region, the weapons of mass deception, the lie bigger than the best of Goebbels, has led us into being a terror target by aligning with the US in its strategy of domination of Middle Eastern oil by putting troops on the ground.

al Quaida’s motives behind the Bali terror attack demonstrate it.

What is on offer to protect us. We have had the alert but not alarmed campaign with its fridge magnet and now we are being offered an identity card. Will a swipe be enough to get you past security, a reflection of the shopper points system? Perhaps an indestructible card so the suicide bombers and their victimns can be identified, provided it is with them.

Other possibilities include baggage checks before boarding a bus or entering a city, shades of Northern Ireland. After all, every time you harden a potential target a less secure one will apppear. Why was the London underground train system attacked and not a plane flown into the Palace of Westminster?.

Dirty bombs

How long before we see the individual bomber with a shrapnel device exploding in a crowd replacing the costs and fear created by infrastructure attacks, the current strategy to influence decision makers, or the security experts’ scenarios of dirty bombs hidden in trucks or on ships making parts of cities uninhabitable.

Rising tension and fear in a populace are an effective addition to the actual death and destruction when hoping to impact on a democracy. Howard has to deny the link between Australia’s involvement on the Arabian Peninsula and terror or he takes some of the responsibility for terrorist attacks related to that involvement.

His government has boosted the spend on security to reduce the posssibility of an attack on Australian territory and activity will no doubt be ratcheted up further.

The question of the government’s capacity to recruit the community to its cause without isolating Muslims, to manage the inherent racism and xenophobia that gave birth to the PHONP and caused Howard to grab that ground in the 2001 election with the boat people scare mongering campaign, will be the real test of its capacity to bring Australian’s together and so isolate and limit the food that terrorist recruiters feed upon.

Unfortunately, we have joined the US in regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan and that has to be seen through, to provide a stable government so the people of those two countries can rebuild their lives. This must be complemented with a just and decent settlement for the Palestinians. 

We must help those 3 countries to rebuild their civil infrastructure with their own efforts, our support for that building respect in our own community and for Australia among the regional populations that are potential recruiting grounds for the suicide bomber.

phill Parsons opposed the attack on Iraq, evidence of WMD and terror links was lacking. Now the US, by lying and rejecting the UN path has fueled a maelstrom that will take generations to settle.