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London terror attacks

London mayor: Attacks were motivated by misguided policies

By wire services
Published July 21, 2005

LONDON - The city's outspoken mayor said Wednesday that the terror attacks in London two weeks ago may have been a reaction to decades of misguided Western policies motivated by a need for oil, remarks certain to fuel an ongoing debate in Britain over whether the country's foreign policy has made the country a target for terrorism.

Meanwhile, Britain's Muslim leaders demanded a judicial inquiry into what motivated the four suicide bombers who targeted London's subway system and a crowded bus, killing at least 56 people.

The government said all 56 have been identified, but Home Secretary Charles Clarke warned the number could rise. Twenty-seven people remained hospitalized, several in critical condition. Police also have not ruled out the possibility of finding more bodies in the mangled wreckage of a train that is still in a deep tunnel near King's Cross station.

In Pakistan, an intelligence official said investigators there arrested a man who had direct links to the July 7 bombings. The Reuters news agency identified him as Haroon Rashid Aswad. But the country's information minister denied that anyone by that name had been arrested. Pakistani investigators used telephone numbers provided by Britain to determine who may have had contact with the bombers.

Three of the bombers, all Britons of Pakistani descent, traveled last year to Karachi in southern Pakistan, where officials are trying to determine whether they received training from extremists.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone criticized U.S. and British foreign policy in the Arab world and called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a "running sore" that alienates Muslims and incites extremism.

So far, most of the debate over British foreign policy has concentrated on whether the country's participation in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq inflamed Muslim sentiment. This line of argument has been robustly rebutted by Blair, who has pointed out that large numbers of terrorist attacks took place before the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

But Livingstone took a much broader tack, criticizing U.S. and British actions since early in the 20th century. He offered a sweeping indictment of Western policy from the end of World War I through the current treatment of prisoners at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"I think you've just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the Western need for oil," he said on BBC Radio. "We've propped up unsavory governments; we've overthrown ones we didn't consider sympathetic."

Livingstone said he had no sympathy for the bombers, and he condemned all violence. But he contended that oil supplies motivated Western governments to intervene in the Middle East.

"If at the end of the First World War we had done what we promised the Arabs, which was to let them be free and have their own governments, and kept out of Arab affairs and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect this wouldn't have arisen."

Information from Cox News Service and the Associated Press was used in this report.

[Last modified July 21, 2005, 00:57:10]