The Blame Game

It took, probably, minutes for the Left to being screaming that 7/7 was the fault of Bush. It's a sentiment that I wasn't exactly expecting to find over at Democracy Arsenal, which has been recommended in one of the conservative blogs that I read- sorry but I can't recall which one right now.

Here it is-

I hate as much as anyone the cheapness, partisanship, and thoughtlessness of the Iraq war and much of the GWOT in general, and do think the President and his staff are to blame.

Of course the statement is made in the context of "we have bigger fish to fry"- which is entirely correct- we're at war and now is certainly not the time for this sort of thing. However, the statement was made anyway and it annoys the hell out of me that this sort of dumb-assed dogma is so ingrained in the Left that it's become purely reflexive. So I wrote this response, which I'm going to post rather than re-jigging into a new post here.

"You believe that George Bush is responsible for British Muslim terrorists planting bombs in London to kill their countrymen? The only people responsible for this are the terrorists involved. It was their decision to plan and carry out this attack and they bear full responsibility.

The war on terror or Iraq did not "make" anyone do anything- if British citizens are upset about the removal of a secular tyrant and the liberation of the majority Muslim Iraqi people (and at the end of the day, that's what it was, regardless of the arguments about WMD or anything else) they live in a free and democratic society and they can make their case at the ballot box. Instead of protesting against the actions of the government peacefully they choose to carry out the indiscriminate murder of innocent people. That's not George Bush's fault. It's not the fault of Iraq or the fault of Afghanistan or Israel or any other of the long list of grievances that the jihadis seem to have- it's the fault of the individuals themselves. They chose this path. No one forced them onto it."

The only thing I want to add is this- and it seems an obvious point- the war on Iraq might piss you off but in a civilised society if you're that annoyed about it you campaign to have something done about it- whether that's emailing/telephoning your MP continually or voting for a different party come next election or organising protests against the war. You do not bomb and murder innocent people in the heart of the capital. Becoming a terrorist is not a small step and the only people to blame for it are the terrorists themselves. George Bush is most assuredly not to blame and to think otherwise displays such a complete lack of rational thought that I'm staggered by it.