Al-Zawahri, Al-Qaeda’s no. 2 man, has made an announcement via video tape (so lo-tech!) that Blair’s to blame for the bombs in London…

What a twist, don’t you think? Terrorists bomb the living hell out of subway passengers, and Blair gets blamed for it because of his policies. However you feel about his policies, what reasonable justification is there for killing innocents? Fine, we’re way beyond principles of just war here, and fine, it’s all about asymmetry in this particular conflict, but this willful targetting of civilians only hurts the terrorist’s aims.

A link here for the newsbit.

I wonder if the right antecedents are being identified in this current conflict. Western governments are demanding, in the first place, that terrorism be ceased or no dialogue will be forthcoming. The same follows for the terrorists who, it appears, have a list of demands of their own before they cease their depredations. The problem is, just what are these demands? I don’t know them. Do you?

And perhaps that’s the problem as this conflict plummets off the edge of reason; just what do these terrorists want? Are their needs or demands inchoate? I don’t know what they seem to want; do they want a new, islamist theocracy in Saudi Arabia? Troops off their land? The expulsion of jews from ‘Israel’? A Palestinian state?

Which is it? And of the above, which seems the most achievable, and in whose interests, really?

Sometimes I think to myself that terrorists might have legitimate demands; my friends point to the pillage of Middle Eastern wealth by the rich nations and the general ’slough of despond’ muslims in that region live in. But such a general malaise would require a solution that cannot and should not be delivered up in absolutist terms: they kill dialogue, they leave no room for discussion, they leave no room for conversation.

Which makes these so-called rich nations all the more adamant about killing off terrorism: when there seems to be no way to reason with the enemy, retaliation with deadly force is the only option left. Some may appear to be ok with this, the most extreme factions of both sides of the conflict (are there sides? perhaps).

But here again, we have another MAD scenario, guaranteed Mutually Assured Destruction. Who wins?

Btw, as an addendum, wanna scare yourself? Check out the Report from Iron Mountain. See this wiki entry for more information here. I read it when I was pretty young, easily influenced and didn’t know it was a hoax at the time. But read it for what it is: a chilling insight into the way scenarios and scenario-resolutions are worked out. It kinda inspired, for a short spell, wargaming scenarios amongst my friends and I.