Asked on Wednesday what he thought had motivated the four suspected suicide bombers, Livingstone cited Western policy in the Middle East and early American backing for
Osama bin Laden.
"A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in (U.S. detention camp) Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn't a just foreign policy," he said.
Police say they believe there is a clear link between bin Laden's al Qaeda network and the four British Muslims who blew up three underground trains and a double-decker bus on July 7.
"You've just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of a Western need for oil. We've propped up unsavory governments, we've overthrown ones that we didn't consider sympathetic," Livingstone said.
"I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s ... the Americans recruited and trained Osama bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians to drive them out of
Afghanistan.
"They didn't give any thought to the fact that once he'd done that, he might turn on his creators," he told BBC radio.
I'm not so sure that I entirely disagree with that. In fact, I think it goes (at least in part) back to a point made by Condoleezza Rice in this speech earlier this year:
"For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither,"
She's right. For a long time America, and the rest of the world, has sought to quench its need for energy in the middle east, often at the cost of the inhabitants there. When it came to ending strife in the region our government often took the easy way out. Instead of putting freedom and democracy on top of our list of priorities we put easy access to petroleum on top.
We have allowed oppression to exist in the middle east for far too long, and that oppression has created a class of down-trodden Muslims who have, in the past few decades, begun to turn to extremist Islam for answers. Extremist Islam has replied with global jihad, the effects of which we've seen on 9/11, 3/11 and 7/7 (just to name a few).
Its too simplistic to say that the terrorists hate us because they hate our freedom. That may be part of it, but its more accurate to say that they hate us because we have never shared our freedom with them. We've rarely done anything in the middle east outside of serving our own interests.
But all that has changed. Secretary Rice also said something else in her speech, and it would do Livingstone and others well to remember it:
Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.
I think that's the key to success in the middle east. No more appeasement of any oppressive or terrorist regimes regardless of how convenient it is to our other objectives. And I think that's the stance the Bush administration is taking in the middle east. Its not been perfect, we've had our ups and downs, but I just don't see another way.
Update:
I should clarify my position by saying that I do not agree with Livingstone about the effects of today's war on terror (Guantanamo Bay et. al.) on the reasons the terrorists have for attacking us. I think we are fighting the current war on terror because we didn't stand up for freedom in democracy in the middle east of the past. The war we wage today, however, is a neccessary one.