http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22369-1690089,00.html

IT'S BEEN a quite a week for what the historian Brendan Simms once
described as "conservative pessimism". If we left everyone else alone,
say the conservative pessimists, then they'd leave us alone. It's all
this doing stuff in the world that leads to trouble. So, don't give us
the Olympics, it's too expensive and we don't want it. Don't spend all
that time on bloody Africa, because it's too complicated and we'll
probably only make things worse. Get out of Iraq as soon as possible and
the chances are that we won't get bombed. Oh (some add) and do we really
have to be quite so welcoming to all these foreigners? You want to be
active? Join English Heritage and help us in the never-ending business
of making the country as much like it was in 1750 as we possibly can.

Let's just do the bombings first. And forgive me a little scepticism
about some of the claims here, not least those made by certain
colleagues in the British press. Yesterday I read the categorical
"invading Iraq clearly made us a target" from someone who continued, "it
diverted our attention and resources from the very people that we should
have been fighting - al-Qaeda", but who just after 9/11 argued that if
the US starts bombing Afghanistan, young Muslims will almost certainly
rally behind the Taleban and Osama bin Laden in a new jihad. In other
words Iraq diverted our resources away from something they shouldn't
have been dedicated to in the first place, because that first thing
would lead to a new jihad.

*
But OK. Inconsistent but not necessarily wrong. The proposition is that
we probably wouldn't have been bombed last Thursday if we hadn't been in
Iraq, and we probably won't be bombed in the future if we pull out.

I want us to agree one thing first. Someone would have been bombed. The
jihadist campaign outside the Middle East first started when the omens
for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement looked good, not bad. Then, just
under seven years ago bin Laden's people attacked the US embassies (no
Bush back then) in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam and killed 225 people, the
vast majority of them local Africans. That was before 9/11.

In November 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, 54 people were killed in a
series of bombings in Istanbul. We remember the death of the British
consul-general, which was described yet again as payback for Iraq. We
forget the attacks on the Neve Shalom and Beth Israel synagogues a few
days earlier. What exactly was that payback for? Attending bar mitzvahs,
perhaps.

In fact a group called the Abu Hafz al-Masri Brigades in claiming
responsibility made a series of demands on the Turkish Government,
should it wish to avoid future attacks. "Listen to us, you criminal,"
the statement began emolliently, "the cars of death will not stop until
you concede to our demands . . .", which included the freeing of
unspecified prisoners from Guantanamo and everywhere else and stopping
the war against Muslims. Demand No 3, however, was for the Turks to
"purify all Islamic land from the filth of the Jews and Americans,
including Jerusalem and Kashmir". Jews out of Kashmir is quite a tall
order, since you'd have to find them first.

A year earlier a whole lot of German and French tourists were blown up
outside the synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia. A few months later a Spanish
restaurant and a Jewish community centre were blown up in Morocco. The
chap who did it had been trained by bin Laden in Afghanistan. The
radicals have blown up Shia mosques in Pakistan, before, after and
during Iraq. They have blown up Iraqi Shias for being apostates. Closer
to home, in spring 2003, two boys, one from Derby and one from Hounslow,
travelled all the way to Gaza and then to Israel so they could blow the
arms off a French waitress in an English bar in Tel Aviv.

What does all this tell us? First, that if they aren't blowing us up,
then they'll be blowing up someone else. And you don't get to choose
who. Secondly, who or what they blow up is largely a matter of what's
available. Jews anywhere, Americans after that, Shia next and Brits
probably a distant fourth. Africans for fun...