Today is one year after the London bombings, and Britons observed the grim anniversary by paying tribute to the victims:

At Edgware Road, where six innocent people died, the station manager organised a floral tribute of irises and carnations for the bereaved families.

Susannah Pall, 25, a City broker who was on the Circle line train which had a number of carriages destroyed in the blast, said she returned to the scene as part of the healing process.

Ms Pall, who has not travelled on the Underground since the bombings, said: "I've been building up to this day. I was going to stay away but decided to come.

"You've got to do these things. Until I do it, I can't move on - it's all part of the catharsis process."

At Aldgate, poems and messages of support were added to a burgeoning floral tribute outside neighbouring St Botolph church.

A book of condolence was placed on a lectern by the gates for passers-by and those affected by the tragedy to sign.

Carrie Taylor, a 24-year-old finance officer at the Royal Society of Arts, was killed in the blast. She came from Billericay in Essex.

A message from her relatives read: "Carrie, we will never forget you, rest in peace. Anne, Danny, May, Dave and David."

At Russell Square the station fell silent as transport staff, police officers and passengers remembered the 26 people who lost their lives on the Piccadilly line train last year.

Relatives and survivors who gathered outside the station tearfully hugged one another as they laid floral tributes to their loved ones.

But why was London a target of such gruesome violence? Anti-terrorism specialists have briefed Scotland Yard officers in a way that points to the inescapable truth:

After the London bombings, British counter-terrorism officials intensified their efforts to understand why some Muslims turned to violence. The document, which has been seen by the Guardian, is the product of that work, and was completed within the past three months before being distributed to senior officers across London. The document says in a headline introducing one section: "Foreign policy and Iraq; Iraq HAS [its emphasis] had a huge impact."

It continues: "Iraq is cited many times in interviews with detained extremists but it is over-simplistic to describe terrorism as the result of foreign policy. What western foreign policy does provide is justification for violence ..."

It says changing jihadist attitudes is a long term issue: "Whatever preventative measures are taken or discussed around the world, none are comprehensive and early results are not expected. Many jihadists do not feel that 'winning' is important because God will see to that eventually - what is important is 'taking part'."

The report says the removal of grievances the jihadists use to justify violence will take time: "What will change them - gradually - is argument, the removal of justifying causes (Palestine, Iraq), the erosion of perverted beliefs and day-to-day frustrations."

Of course, it is beyond the pale of acceptable discourse to state that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has so angered Muslims around the world that they are now willing to act violently against the perpetrators of them. It is, as the report states, oversimplistic, evading the fact that terrorism in Britain, prior to the invasion, was not the province of Muslims. Conversely, Davey D. of Hard Knock Radio had no difficulty finding people in the crowd along Edgeware Road, during the afternoon after the bombings, who recognized that the bombings were a direct response to the war in Iraq.

So, the authors of the report rely upon a fiction to convey the more disturbing truth about Iraq to its Scotland Yard audience: Jihadists are relying upon hostility towards the war and occupation of Iraq to justify violence that they have already decided to inflict upon us. No doubt there are hard core jihadists committed to taking violent action against the United States and Britain, regardless of what has transpired in Iraq, although even here, even in the case of al-Qaeda, it is highly dubious, if not erroneous, to disassociate such violent intentions from political motivations, as Pat Buchanan has correctly observed on a number of occasions.

Furthermore, this fiction leads to questions that lack credible answers. For example, if the threat of future terror attacks in London has palpaply increased, as asserted by Metropolitan Police Chief Ian Blair, how can this be possible if the people motivated to carry out such attacks had a predisposition to do so prior to the war in Iraq? It would seem that the only plausible response to this question is an absurd one, namely that Great Britain has a significant number of Muslims bent upon violence who lacked the fortitude to follow through upon their convictions until the British participated in the invasion of Iraq. It all sounds very much like the stereotypical view of Arabs promoted by Zionists and other supporters of Israel. Arabs are violent, yet cowardly, until prompted to inflict violence upon others as a juvenile emotional response to external events.

Last year, the people in the Edgeware Road crowd knew better. The bombers responded to our violence with their violence, and there is something culturally demeaning in a perspective, as implied by the authors of the report, that Americans and Britains use violence in a calculated way to achieve allegedly acceptable ends, but that Arabs and Muslims merely exploit current events to justify it. In other words, they, unlike us, lack the human qualities of anger, thought and commitment, and indeed, transformation, such that some may have concluded that they only way to confront the perpetrators of the war and occupation, in both Iraq and Palestine, is through violence.

A lamentable, tragic decision, to be sure, but no less so than the ones by Britain and the United States to invade and, apparently, permanently occupy Iraq, and the insistence of Israel to permanently colonize the West Bank and Gaza. And, of course, the dead in Gaza, Ramadi, Haditha, Jenin, Fallujah . . . they are just numbers, if reported at all, and if there have been flowers laid and tears shed, as they justifiably have been for the victims of 7/7/05, it has failed to capture our imagination.

Labels: "War on Terror", 7/7/05, Al Qaeda, Iraq War, Islam, Occupation of Iraq, Tony Blair