Mayor blames Middle East policy

Decades of British and American intervention in the oil-rich Middle East motivated the London bombers, Ken Livingstone has suggested.

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He replied: "I think you've just had 80 years of western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the western need for oil. "We've propped up unsavoury governments, we've overthrown ones we didn't consider sympathetic. "And 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 and 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 argued: "If at the end of the First World War we had done what we promised the Arabs, which was to let them be free and have their own governments, and kept out of Arab affairs, and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect this wouldn't have arisen." He attacked double standards by Western nations, such as the initial welcome given when Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq. There was also the "running sore" of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict... He also denounced "those governments which use indiscriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy, as we have occasionally seen with the Israeli government bombing areas from which a terrorist group will have come, irrespective of the casualties it inflicts, women, children and men". He continued: "Under foreign occupation and denied the right to vote, denied the right to run your own affairs, often denied the right to work for three generations, I suspect that if it had happened here in England, we would have produced a lot of suicide bombers ourselves."