The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said yesterday that western foreign policy has fuelled the Islamist radicalism behind the July 7 London bomb attacks. In an interview with the BBC on Wednesday, Livingstone said: “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.” Livingstone continued, “I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s … 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’d done that, he might turn on his creators.” Livingstone also blasted the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the US prison camp at Guantanamo. An opinion poll this week showed two-thirds of Britons see a connection between the Iraq occupation and the bombings.