For a long time the failed (mercifully) attempt of 23 year-old Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, to blow up the aircraft he was travelling to the US in on its soil will continue to grab the headlines of the global media if only because his is the first by a non-Arab, non-Asian Muslim. His being young, Nigerian, well educated and from a wealthy family background has only added to the terrifying novelty. Nigerians, young and old, have, of course, long established a dubious reputation for drug peddling, advance fee fraud, credit card scam, etc. But suicide bombing? It simply beggared belief.

What, a perplexed world has been asking, would drive such a man widely described as shy, obedient and generally virtuous into wanting to blow himself and other apparently innocent passengers up just to get even with America for its war against so-called Islamic terrorism?  All sorts of theories have been advanced as explanation, from the seemingly sensible (e.g. parental neglect) to the ridiculous (Islam, Faruk’s religion, is an inherently violent, reactionary religion). None of these theories, however, have dwelt on the source of Faruk’s seemingly irrational behaviour, obvious as this source is.

This source is Big Business, more specifically Big Western Business. And before you scoff at what I have just said as outmoded Marxist rubbish, consider the following remarks by some of the West’s own leading lights in politics and the media.

In its June28, 2003 edition, The Economist, arguably the West’s most pre-eminent mouthpiece ran a survey on capitalism and democracy entitled “Radical thoughts on our 160^th birthday.” In that survey, the magazine accused Western governments of being too devoted to business as against their devotion to market forces.

“In the more liberal era of the past 20 years,” the magazine said, “governments have often been accused of being too devoted to markets. Actually, a more telling accusation is that they have been too devoted to business.” In other words, the State in the West, as in much of the world, has become a captive of Big Business with its ethos of greed, corruption and such vices. As the award winning investigative American journalist, Greg Palast, said in his 2002 book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, “The corporations don’t have to lobby government anymore. They ARE the government.”

The leader in this corporate capture of the State is Big Oil, petroleum – and its associated gas - having become central to life in the modern age as the cheapest, if not the most efficient, source of energy.

Shorn of all its pretences, the two American invasions of Iraq under the presidency of the two Bushes, who are big oil men, were all about oil, something nature decided to locate mostly in the predominantly Muslim Middle East. The pretences that they were there, first to stop the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, from acquiring the nuclear bomb, and when that was exposed as a lie, the pretence that they wanted to rid Iraq of his tyranny, were just that – pretences.

Naturally this war was bound to assume a religious dimension since the invaders were of a different faith. It was also bound to be seen by the victims as an unjust war.

No one, I think, has captured this better than Boris Johnson, a former editor at the London Spectator and now the mayor of London. Writing in The Telegraph of London (December 26, 2002), he said, “If I had an illegal revolver in my house, I could hardly object, if the police decided to burst in and put it beyond use...But I think I might feel hard done by if the police decided that, in order to accomplish this end, it was necessary to blow up my house, and kill me and many of my relatives. That sense of injustice would be all the greater if they had no real proof that I had the wretched revolver in the first place.”

The fact is that the subservience of Western governments to the interests of Big Business in formulating their foreign policies has led to a feeling of injustice and hopelessness among victims of those policies. This, of course, cannot justify suicide bombing by any one, especially when it is carried out by non-Arabs like Faruk as an act of religious solidarity. It does, however, explain it.

“Nine Eleven” was not really the cause of Bush Jnr’s invasion of Iraq. Long before 9/11 he has decided on the invasion, urged on by the neo-conservatives who had captured the American State beginning with Ronald Reagan’s presidency in 1980. 9/11 merely provided an excuse. This was why Bush decided to treat it as an act of war rather than the act of crime that it was.

The Iraqi invasion could never have been, and now the Afghanistan invasion which President Barack Obama has decided to describe as “a just war” can never be, the key to preventing another 9/11.

As one, John Merasheimer, said writing in last year’s Newsweek Special Issue, “The real key to preventing another 9/11, however, is for the Unites States to work closely with other governments to monitor Al Qaeda and round up terrorists before they strike. Timely intelligence and sound police work are the main reasons why there has not been another attack on the U.S. homeland. The war in Afghanistan has done little to make Americans safer at home, and prolonging it won’t either. It’s been a bad war from the start and will be to the bitter end.”  

That Faruk failed to succeed in his terrible mission was clearly no thanks to the intelligence services of both his home country and of the U.S. In the case of Nigeria it was obviously a case of incompetence for which heads should have rolled since if only there was effective leadership in the country.

As for the Americans there is every chance that someone may have chosen to let Faruk succeed to provide an excuse for the ramping up of the so-called war on Islamic terror.

Mercifully Faruk failed. Hopefully the lessons of his near success have been learnt by all.