“The first piece of disinformation long peddled by champions of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is that al-Qaida and its supporters have no demands that could possibly be met or negotiated over; that they are really motivated by a hatred of western freedoms and way of life; and that their Islamist ideology aims at global domination. The reality was neatly summed up this week in a radio exchange between the BBC’s political editor, Andrew Marr, and its security correspondent, Frank Gardner, who was left disabled by an al-Qaida attack in Saudi Arabia last year. Was it the ‘very diversity, that melting pot aspect of London’ that Islamist extremists found so offensive that they wanted to kill innocent civilians in Britain’s capital, Marr wondered. ‘No, it’s not that,’ replied Gardner briskly, who is better acquainted with al-Qaida thinking than most. ‘What they find offensive are the policies of western governments and specifically the presence of western troops in Muslim lands, notably Iraq and Afghanistan’.”

Seumas Milne in the Guardian, 14 July 2005