Ken Livingstone has suggested that decades of Western intervention in the Middle East motivated the London suicide bombers. And I applaud him for this.

Interviewer: What do you think motivated these men?

Livingstone: I think if you’ve just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands, because of a western need for oil. We’ve propped up unsavory governments. We’ve overthrown ones that we didn’t consider sympathetic. And I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s we funded Osa…well I say we… the Americans recruited and trained Osama Bin Laden. Taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians, to drive them out of Afghanistan. They didn’t give any thought to the fact that once he done that, he might turn on his creators.

Interviewer: So we are to blame?

Livingstone: I… If at the end of World War I we’d done what we promised the Arabs, which was to let them be free, have their own government and kept out of Arab affairs and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we have to control the flow of oil. I suspect this would not have arisen. But, I mean, you know you have watched, as I have watched, Western governments so terrified of loosing control of their fuel supplies. All my life theirs been interventions in the Middle East by Western governments.

Interviewer: But its an extraordinary claim, thought, to say that, because of British and American Foreign Policy over oil that we’re now in a situation where people, British born people, born and bread here are bombing London.

Livingstone: But… it’s the double standards that flow from that. We initially welcomed Saddam Hussein to power. Our intelligence services gave him lists… Unionists and Communists… that we wanted killed. He then turned on us. And you’ve also got this running saw of the Palestine Israeli conflict and I think a lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn't a just foreign policy.

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Interviewer: Are you saying that, in a sense, you understand why these men did this?

Livingstone: Understand is a term is used as an expression of sympathy and I don’t have any sympathy for this, because… killing people is wrong. I didn’t oppose capital punishment decade after decade, then to turn around and say that it’s alright when suicide bombers blow people up, but you see I don’t just denounce the suicide bombers I denounce those governments that use discriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy as we’ve occasionally seen with the Israeli government bombing areas from which a terrorist will have come irrespective of the casualties of innocent women and children and men.

Interviewer: Do you denounce suicide bombing wherever it is or do you draw a distinction between a suicide bomb in London and one in Israel?

Livingstone: I have always said… I do not support any suicide bomber…

Interviewer: But there is a problem isn’t there, that when the people give a slight mixed message about perhaps the suicide bombings carried out by Palestinians … that perhaps it might be acceptable to blow up a bomb in Israel.

Livingstone: But if you have been under foreign occupation and denied the right to vote, denied the right to run your own affairs, often denied the right to work for three generations, I suspect that if it had happened here in England, we would have produced a lot of suicide bombers ourselves.