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West's policies to blame: Mayor

Don Melvin

LONDON: London's outspoken Mayor said on Wednesday the terror attacks in the city two weeks ago may have been a reaction to decades of misguided Western policies motivated by a need for oil, remarks certain to fuel an ongoing debate in Britain over whether the country's foreign policy has made the country a target for terrorism.

Britain's Muslim leaders demanded a judicial inquiry into what motivated the four suicide bombers who targeted the subway system and a crowded bus.

Mayor Ken Livingstone criticised U.S. and British foreign policy in the Arab world and called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a ``running sore'' that alienates Muslims and incites extremism. He criticised U.S. and British actions since early in the 20th Century. He offered a sweeping indictment of Western policy from the end of World War I through the treatment of prisoners at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Need for oil

``I think you've just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the Western need for oil,'' he said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. ``We've propped up unsavoury governments; we've overthrown ones we didn't consider sympathetic.'' He said he had no sympathy for the bombers, and he condemned all violence.

"But he contended that fear of losing oil supplies motivated Western governments to intervene in West Asia time and again.''

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