World would be safer if we did not interfere in ME: Ex-Mayor

EghtesadOnline: Ken Livingstone, Former Mayor of London believes that the recent terrorist attacks in London and Europe are connected with the Western failed foreign policy.

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26 March 2017

In an interview with IRNA in London and commenting on recent attack in London, Livingstone said, 'Back in 2005 after the terrorist attack in London, people seemed very low and nervous the days afterwards; we have got very good at stopping most terrorist attacks so far, but occasionally one would get through if it’s a loner like this.'

On the root cause of the recent incident, he said, 'ISIS may just be lying. If there had been obvious clear links between the terrorists and ISIS, it would have been picked up by the security services and it would have been caught.
I think it is much more likely that it’s a lone individual who may attach due to psychological problems and that’s been the tactic of terrorist attacks in Europe in the last three or four years. It's not like a great coordinated attack on London in 2005 or 9/11 in America.

The following is excerpts of the interview:

Q. We have news that the attacker was known to the security services; how did he manage to get out of their sight?
A. I think the security services are monitoring the movement of about 30 thousand people. So, if we discover that they are trying to buy guns or if they are in contact with an international terrorist organization, then very swiftly they get arrested and then we prevent the attack.
He might have been monitored because he had criminal records, but I don’t think he was linked to a great plot and that makes it much more difficult for the police and the security services to pin him down.

Q. Do you see any links between this incident and the UK’s foreign policy?
A. Clearly Britain, France and America had spent so much of the last 100 years interfering in the Middle East, overthrowing governments that we didn’t like and getting control on the oil supply and if they had not done that, the world would be in a much better state today.
It might well be that what motivated the attacker could just be psychological problems, but if you go back to the bombing in 2005, the message that the terrorist left did link to the interventions in the Middle East. They made that absolutely clear.

Q. Do you think that such incidents or similar ones that we have witnessed so far in Europe, could have been prevented if a right foreign policy from the West would have been taken?
A. To my mind, we had the invasion of Egypt in 1956; we have had a series of Israeli invasions, bombing of Gaza, overthrowing the regimes in Libya and in Iraq and staying with those dictators who had made certain that fundamentalism was kept severely in place.

Q. Do you have any memories of the incident which happened in 2005?
It was very frustrating. I was on the other side of the planet and could not get back in to London until the next day, and I was desperate to be here. It's very hard for me to stick to those times without moving into tears.

*Ken Livingstone was Mayor of London in 2000-2008.