My immediate suggestion

is the same as yours - the people who carried out the bombings in London should be found and punished. The people killed today were not guilty, they did not deserve to die and those responsible should be brought to account.

In the long term, though, I do think British foreign policy needs to be rethought. There was no need for us to join either the Afghanistan or Iraq campaigns - they were America's wars to fight, if they needed to be fought. Of course, they were both resultant of American foreign policy decisions taken in the 1970s and 1980s.

The whole thing is a mess. I despise Blair, yet (for me) in a two-party system, he is marginally the lesser of two evils - British foreign policy would have been no different had the Tories been in charge.

This global political conflict between Islam and Christianity, and America's assumption of the role of global police (putting itself beyond the UN and pursuing an illegal war without a mandate) needs to be ended. And the only way people can do that is to oppose Western intervention in matters that don't concern them, and to deny them a mandate for their political programmes.

The relationship between Western neo-imperialism and fundamentalist Islamic terrorism is a two-way one, and they rely upon and sustain each other. All we in the West can do is try to dismantle the political superstructure that supports and enables that imperialism. But those of us opposed to Bush and Blair can do that, as a third force operating within their countries - if they are out of power they can do nothing.

The mindset that removing Blair from power and replacing him with a leader with a more flexible approach to the US-UK relationship is somehow "pandering to terrorism" needs to be challenged. Which we can do. But it is deeply entrenched, and will take a long time.

If a third force removes the neo-conservative governments that need an 'Enemy' to sustain their political project (and they do - there is no way Bush and Blair could have sold their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without the idea of 'Al-Qaeda'), then the Enemy loses its sustaining cause. It's a matter of people reclaiming democracy and making it work, I think - forming a genuine opposition to Blair in this country - and being allowed an influence upon important governmental decisions (like wars).

Because the neo-conservatives who pursued Iraq and Afghanistan weren't liberals, they weren't democratic, they merely appropriated liberal rhetoric and gave it their own connotations, making it serve their own ends. Which has allowed them to convince enough people that they are defending democracy, which hides the real nature of the neo-con project.

The fundamentalist Islamic fringe (IMHO) does want to destroy what is good about the Western way of life. So it is enough for the people of Britain to continue living in their usual way, without fear and without resignation, for them to combat the terrorist murderers. But they can also combat the governments who sustain the bombers' existence.

So that's it, for me: people need to dismantle the conflict, not just steel their resolve against one side in it. The conflict benefits no-one but a small clique. The Spanish people took the first steps by removing Aznar. I am not suggesting we overthrow Blair undemocratically, merely find a democratic opposition not just to Blair but to Bush as well. That's the only solution I see. But I don't expect it to happen soon.

Posted By: Ottosson Foxtrot on July 8th 2005 at 03:42:50

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