The BBC’s war drums make me feel physically sick.
Considering that the Islamic State was born out of the groups which resisted the West’s complete destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, why do our politicians think that we can bomb their hatred away?
The rise is ISIS is testament to the fact that violence and hatred only breeds violence and hatred. The last attack on Iraq left 150,000 civilians dead, along with 179 British soldiers. Clearly the policy of killing the families of the people which were branded ‘terrorists’ didn’t work last time, and there is no reason for it to work on this occasion.
US airstrikes have today killed at least five civilians in Syria, guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and therefore having to face the indiscriminate wrath of the world’s most powerful war machine.
The cost of these operations is immense. Britain’s bombing campaign in Libya, which started a vicious and seemingly unending cycle of sectarian violence that has thus far left 30,000 people dead, cost up to a billion pounds. This could have paid for any of the following: 2,700 teachers, 3,300 nurses, 125 new primary schools, 40 secondary schools or 40 community hospitals (all without killing anybody).
I’m not claiming to know the solution to the obvious issues in Iraq and Syria, but the point is that attacking these people isn’t going to solve any problems. History will repeat, anti-west sentiment will spread, innocent men, women and children will die in far away countries, most people will bury their heads in the sand and we will all be shocked when there is blood on the streets of Britain.
Will we deserve it? Of course the individuals that suffer, the future Lee Rigby’s and the David Foulkes’, will not deserve their fate; but as a nation we will inevitably reap the fruits of the toxic seeds that we sow.