Of course you feel more connected when you can directly relate. A year ago, I was at King’s Cross station in morning rush hour with my five-year-old, on our way to Nottingham and Sherwood Forest. That aside, as a friend said yesterday: “What’s so special? It’s Madrid again, isn’t it?” Yes, it is.

But I want to invoke a different, less personal connection. I say this against George Bush, who quickly claimed the “contrast” couldn’t be “clearer” between yesterday’s London bombings and the concurrent G8 talks about ending poverty in Africa, or Tony Blair, who pointed to the same contrast as intentional and “particularly barbaric.” I think there is a grim but real relation between the bombings and the acts of the mighty nations of the G8 — and I’m not speaking metaphorically.

As Columbia prof Mahmood Mamdani traces in his book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, the kind of terror that occurred yesterday was incubated in U.S. policy going back to the Vietnam years, when Laotian tribesmen were recruited to fight a secret, brutal war. In the 1980s, the “contras” were created and maintained by the U.S. to wreak sheer terror on Nicaragua, targeting innocent people for political ends, in the same despicable way as happened in London. Ronald Reagan legitimized them as “freedom fighters” and compared them to the U.S.’s “founding fathers” — as he also once described Muslim fighters that the U.S. recruited to fight a war of terror in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. In the 1990s, a U.S.-led campaign of sanctions sadistically terrorized the people of Iraq while propping up Saddam Hussein. In this way, Mahmood Mamdani writes, terror was normalized into international conflicts.

Let me make the connection more specific. In Afghanistan, working with its partners in Pakistan’s security service, the U.S. funded and trained as many as 100,000 religiously fanatical mujahedeen, of whom 5,000 to 15,000 saw action. Then it simply abandoned them. Many of these people now are al-Qaeda and its offshoots. They scattered after the Afghan war, back to their homelands or around the world, applying their acquired skills. Let me specify further. The training they got was often in the use of the kinds of explosives set off in Madrid and, most likely, in London yesterday. Huge amounts of such weapons were left in their hands.

This is not a bit of unexpected “blowback,” as has often been said. This is the same reliance on terror by many of the same people, possibly using the same weapons. It’s all sickening: the targeting of totally innocent people, the appalling sanctions against Iraqi kids, the bombs yesterday, 9/11. But you can’t create, legitimate and utilize terror for decades, even as you officially condemn it out of the other side of your mouth, then suddenly claim to stand utterly clear of its incarnations.

Not even their language separates the “sides.” The U.S. justified support for its terrorist “freedom fighters” by saying they were battling the “evil empire” of the Soviets. Now the Soviets are gone, but, yesterday, George Bush again said this is about good versus evil. Many mujahedeen learned the language of good versus evil while in Afghanistan. Today, they fling it at their former sponsors, who fling it back. None of this absolves the bombers of responsibility for their bombs, but it makes for less than a clear contrast with the leaders of the G8.

I don’t say this for the sake of academic or intellectual clarity, nor to assign moral points and smudges to the various players. What matters is to interfere with the accumulating carnage. It’s been small-scale so far, but who knows when a dirty bomb will enter the equation? To do that — to alter course — you must know how things reached this point and, especially, which forces that got us here are still operating: like torture and “rendition” on one side, tracked by beheadings and kidnappings on the other.

The answers may be depressing, but it’s better than Tony Blair’s piffle about how “their” aim is to destroy “our way of life” by attacking “all nations and civilized peoples.” Too late, Tony. Your civilized nations are up to their necks in this muck.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.