Our Al Qaeda problem.

• Author: Abramsky, Sasha
• Position: Cover Story

A summer began, I flew to London to stay with my parents. A few days after I arrived, four bombs blew up tube trains and a bus in central London on July 7. It was the second time I had been in a city that was under attack by terrorists. Four years ago, I was living in Brooklyn when Al Qaeda slammed passenger jets into the World Trade Center.

Over these four years, I have spent more time than is entirely healthy obsessing over the new realities. Some of my friends and relatives tell me I've changed--that my politics aren't as "leftwing" as they used to be during the anti-nuclear movement in Britain back in the 1980s. In a way, they are right. My core politics haven't changed, but it seems to me that the world has changed so dramatically--traditional alliances and reference points have become unreliable, the ground rules of the power game have so shifted--I'd be a fool not to incorporate these changes into my analytical framework.

Unlike my fellow countryman Christopher Hitchens, however, whose break with erstwhile comrades on the left over foreign policy has resulted in a wholesale swing rightward, I still hope that my rethinking of some foreign policy questions can be incorporated into a vibrant progressive movement. Indeed, I'd argue that a strong defense of pluralistic, democratic societies needs to be an essential, perhaps a defining, component of any genuinely progressive politics in today's world.

Yet reading the voices of much of the self-proclaimed "left" in the London papers in the aftermath of the bombings, I was struck by how ossified many of them have become, how analyses crafted at the height of the Cold War have lingered as paltry interpretive frameworks for political fissures bearing little if anything in common with that "twilight conflict." While on the one hand, I agreed with their well-reasoned arguments pointing to a certain degree of Western culpability for spawning groups like Al Qaeda, on the other hand, I was saddened by how utterly incapable were those same arguments of generating responses to the fanaticism of our time.

British journalists Robert Fisk, John Pilger, and Tariq Ali, along with British MP George Galloway, and, on this side of the Atlantic, commentators such as Naomi Klein have all essentially blamed Britain and the U.S. for bringing the attacks upon themselves. While being careful to denounce the bombers and their agenda, these advocates uttered variations on the same theme: Get out of Iraq, bring home the troops from all points East, curtail support for Israel, develop a more sensible, non-oil-based energy policy, and our troubles would dissipate in the wind.

"These are Blair's bombs," Pilger, famous for helping to bring to light the genocidal actions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, wrote while the bodies of the July 7 victims were still being identified.

"What we are confronting here is a specific, direct, centralized attack on London as a result of a 'war on terror' that Blair has locked us into," Fisk wrote immediately after the bombings. "Just before the U.S. Presidential elections, bin Laden asked: 'Why do we not attack Sweden?' Lucky Sweden. No Osama bin Laden there. And no Tony Blair." Fisk's quotation marks around "war on terror" suggested none too subtly that battling terror organizations is mere subterfuge for a more nefarious agenda. And his reference to Sweden misses the point that Al Qaeda's modus operandi involves attacking nodal points of Western power rather than peripheral regions.

The problem, Klein recently argued in The...