Bruce Bisset: West behaviour as bad as Isis

'We have no place there and, for joining in this time, our failure will inevitably see the arrival of terror on our home streets. says Bruce Bisset. Photo / NZME.

As the chances of a terrorist incident erupting in our midst increase, it is all too easy to blame the evil of Islamic State and other Middle Eastern militants for such acts while ignoring the history that has created their cause and the punitive wars that have fuelled their hatred.

Worse, to view any adherent of Islam as the enemy, and so condone any measures (no matter how extreme) taken against them in order to uphold supposed democratic freedoms is the classic "end justifies the means" argument so beloved of despotic leaders since time immemorial.

Former US Vice-President Dick Cheney, whose company Haliburton has made between US$50 billion-US$100 billion in profits from security and infrastructure contracts post-invasion in Iraq, clearly falls into that camp.

His reaction to the damning report on CIA torture of suspected terrorists was "I'd do it again in an instant", adding he had "no problem" with more than 40 proven innocents being tortured and held prisoner for years "so long as we achieve our objective".

Bizarrely, the US Government paid two psychologists about US$80 million to provide new and supposedly more effective ways to brutalise people in custody. Quite why they needed to, for such an enormous sum, is anyone's guess.

Naturally the CIA and those, like Cheney, who were in charge at the time have tried to downplay the use of such abhorrent techniques as waterboarding and "rectal feeding", coining "enhanced interrogation" as a euphemism for torture.

But the fact is the US and its allies - yes, including New Zealand - has not only waged several wars of varying scope and size across the Middle East for decades, but has committed atrocities - including torturing suspects to death - every bit as repugnant as an Isis beheading.

Why are they then so surprised when extremists become ever more malignantly inhuman in their counter actions?

As respected long-term Middle East journalist-turned-activist John Pilger says: "The day the war criminals here [in the US] are exposed is the day the blood begins to dry."

I am in no way attempting to excuse the slaughter of 132 schoolchildren by the Taliban or that of two hostages in a Sydney cafe by a crazed lone gunman this week. Nor myriad gruesome deaths of mostly-unarmed citizenry throughout the world at the hands of fanatics - including the Twin Towers demolition.

But blindly following the tenet of an eye for an eye not only inflames the passions of war, but repeats the overlooked lessons of history.

As one of the world's foremost economists, Geoffrey Sachs, recently pointed out, there are remarkable parallels between 1919 and 1989; the end of WWI and the Versailles Treaty, and the end of the Cold War and break-up of the USSR.

Both eras saw the victor impose harsh and unprincipled burdens on the loser that fermented a desire for revenge; Hitler's Third Reich and Putin's campaign to resurrect the USSR were the respective result.

It should also be remembered the arbitrary dividing up of the Ottoman Middle East arose from the Versailles Treaty, thereafter enforced by the Anglo-French-American imperialists.

Add in the anomalous thorn that is Israel plus that Russia has long been an opposing regional player and you can begin to explain, if not excuse, why terrorism there is rife.

For John Key to now reprise the Anzac concept in relation to Isis is the worst case of coat-tail politics for brown-nose points I've seen.

We have no place there and, for joining in this time, our failure will inevitably see the arrival of terror on our home streets.

That's the right of it.

Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.