Len No, there's no evading issues. I started posting these things because I got fed up with local labour people going into denial over why they lost this seat. I'm not a Lib Dem. I want to be a Labour supporter, but the party has lost its way. Alan, Iraq was not a threat to anybody. It was a busted flush after the Iran War and the 1st war with us. It was on its knees. And if you don't know that Al Qaida and Sadam hated each others guts then you reaslly know nothing about the Middle East. Any tenuous links were purely on the basis of my enemy's enemy is my friend , as they say in the Middle East, not some meaningful alliance. You may well have studied Terrorism at University. Books are all very well. But have you ever been there? Met them? Understood how that area works? You can't get that from books mate. I've walked round a Palestinian refugee camp full of women and kids in cardboard boxes a few days before the Israeli Airforce flattened it and told an uncritical world it was a terrorist training camp; sat in Beirut talking to Christian Arabs referring to Palestinian refugees as their equivalent of "Pakis" (his word) in England; been trapped in the middle of a PLO firefight - with the Jordanian Army trying to kick them out of Amman; helped shelter Iranian dissidents in hiding from Iranian secret police - in Manchester!! - when the Shah ruled Iran (he was imposed on Iran by the British and very pro-Western); sat and talked with a nice mild middle class palestinian guy just after he and his family had been evicted from Nablus by the Israelis and his family home bulldozed becauwse they wanted the land; sat in Riyadh in the palace of a Saudi prince with his mates as they got blind drunk on smuggled whiskey and bought in arab women (whose husbands were absent) for their pleasure, whilst their family's subjects face the death penalty for adultery and imprisonment for drinking alcohol; sat merrily getting drunk in Muscat with British Army Officers fighting a civil war un knkown to the people of Britain, and merrily also going over the border into the Yemen in hot pursuit. All denied over here at the time. The point of that long monologue is that the West has raped the Middle East, turned it into a complex mess, and is paying the consequences for years and years of interference and imposing corrupt puppet regimes in order to ensure cheap oil and a submissive populace, and all the recent crap that has happened with terrorism, Sadam, Iran, Afghanistan , Israel etc etc etc is a direct consequence of that, and the invasion of Iraq is merely the latest step in that corrupt colonial process under the pretence of trying to bring peace and justice to Iraq. If you actually bother to read Al Qaida statements, by the way, you will see that they are all about expelling USA and its allies from Arab soil and retruning it to arab hands, and ridding Arab lands of foreign interference. Which bit of that do you disagree with? If youve studied terrorism then you will know that terrorism is alomost always based around a just cause, and that tyerrorisn can only ever be overcome by addressing those causes in the first place. Same applies in Arabia. As for 911, I did not say that Neo cons caused it. I am saying they exploited it for their own purposes. And they did. Their only bloody literature had already said theyd needed something of that nature to enable them to launch their plans. Read their pamphlets. And, to finally get back to the point,a large number of the British electorate, to their credit, vaguely realised that this was going on and voted against Labour in protest over it in Iraq. What goes around, comes around

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