Whose al-Qaida problem? Open Democracy ^<http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-terrorism/left_crisis_2892.jsp#>| 10/04/05 | Sasha Abramsky Excerpt: Much of the lefts opposition to the Iraq war and the Bush administrations anti-terror campaigns voiced by figures like Tariq Ali, Robert Fisk, George Galloway, Naomi Klein, and John Pilger has blinded it to the need to engage with real problems and threats, says Sasha Abramsky. 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-Qaida, 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 the other side of the Atlantic, commentators such as Naomi Klein have all essentially blamed Britain and the United States 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. -- Cheers, M.A. Camp, Esq.