The responsibility we share for Islamist shock and awe

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | The responsibility we share for Islamist shock and awe: "Suicide bombings seem worst of all. We feel unable to do anything to make ourselves safer. It's no good being vigilant for 'suspicious' packages because the bomber carries his cargo on his back and, even if you think you've spotted it, he can still blow everybody up. Even a police officer can only shoot for the head, and risk killing an innocent person, as happened at Stockwell tube station. That innocent, particularly if you have a darkish skin, could be you.

And a home-grown suicide bomber, dreaming of 72 virgins for himself and 'a painful doom' (in the Qur'an's words) for his victims, seems an unpleasantly self-absorbed figure. What does he hope to achieve? He issues no statement, no programme, no final words to secure his place in the history books. It seems to be pure nihilism.

Yet a bomber needs support: he needs to find like-minded fellow bombers, people to supply explosives and detonators, people to organise his operation. The bombers may be 'bastards', to use the term favoured by red-top newspaper writers, but from what does their bastardy spring? Perhaps it is just another version of the mindset that makes white thugs in Liverpool sink an axe into the head of a black 18-year-old. Or perhaps it is another internet phenomenon, whereby a man who gets his kicks out of exploding deadly bombs can find soulmates, just as a German cannibal can find someone who wants to be eaten. But I think there is more to it; the attacks are 'explicable' (which is not the same as 'justifiable') in the sense that Dominic Grieve, the shadow attorney general, used the word on Wednesday.

A section of the Islamic world believes the west is waging war on it, that this war has intensified with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and that it could intensify further with an invasion of Iran. It's no use saying the 2001 attack preceded those invasions. As far as many Muslims are concerned, it went on for most of the 20th century. Arabs were expelled from Israel in the 1940s; Israel occupied the West Bank from 1967; the first Gulf war took place in 1991 and, to Bin Laden's rage, led to US troops polluting sacred Saudi soil. The US has propped up corrupt, secular, pro-western tyrannies throughout the Islamic world - and then blamed and even bombed Muslims for their failure to embrace democracy."