IN SCALE, IT WAS neither a 9/11 nor even a 3/11. Though grisly, brutal, and indiscriminate, the terror attack on London produced many fewer casualties than the assaults on New York four years ago or Madrid last year. On the gruesome slide rule of death Osama bin Laden and his cronies lovingly finger, London looks like a relative failure–fewer fatalities than in Bali in 2002, and well below the almost weekly outrages the terrorists visit on the people of Iraq.
The scale of the atrocity was not the only factor blunting its immediate effect. This must have been one of the most anticipated shocks in recent history. Since 9/11, and more urgently the invasion of Iraq two years ago, Londoners had been repeatedly reminded that they would almost certainly become the targets of an attack.
But if the measure is different, the meaning is the same. For Britain the bombings of 7/7 pose exactly the same test as 9/11 did for the United States and as 3/11 did for Spain. America, of course, passed that test. The response of the Bush administration began the long fight back against baleful Islamism. The Spanish, tragically and consequentially, failed the test. Indeed, Madrid still ranks as the largest defeat in the war on terrorism since the original attack on the World Trade Center.
The bargain struck between fanatics and civilized people in Spain was quick, brutal, and terrible. Terrorists murdered 191 in Madrid, and instructed the Spanish people to get out of Iraq now if they wanted to be spared worse punishment. Within 48 hours, the Spanish had fully complied, electing a Socialist government committed to appeasement. Within a week, the new government had completed the payoff by starting to pull Spanish forces out of Iraq.
London, we all said at the time, would be different. When the inevitable happened to innocent Londoners, it would surely steel public opinion; even those skeptical about the Iraq war would surely not be cowed into submission like the Spanish. No one put this more eloquently last week than Donald Rumsfeld, in a powerful encomium to the British hours after the attacks:
“If terrorists thought they could intimidate the people of a great nation during today’s attacks in London, they picked the wrong people and the wrong nation. History is filled with examples of tyrants, fascists, and terrorists intent on carrying out violence against the British people only to founder.”
Some, however, did not share the confidence expressed in Rumsfeld’s remarks. They wondered whether the British really are up to the challenge. The anaesthetized Britain of today is not Winston Churchill’s Britain. Demoralized after a generation of indoctrination by the appeaseniks and moral-equivalence crowd who dominate the media and the universities, de-motivated by years of swiftly rising affluence, deracinated by the steady encroachment of European institutional jurisdiction, Britons might now lack the stomach to fight, and blame instead Tony Blair and George Bush for the evil that has befallen them.
So who’s right? The immediate reaction to the atrocity last week has provided ammunition to both sides.
Much has been made of the straight-backed British stoicism on display last week. It may be a cliché, but it is one rooted in truth. Though the casualty count was mercifully low by recent terrorist standards, it was still the worst attack on London since World War II. Yet life for most Brits went on, the ordinariness of everyday activity betraying an air of quiet defiance. In pubs across London on Thursday nights, TV sets were as likely tuned into the cricket match (England beat Australia) as to the news of the terror. On Friday, despite warnings to stay home for fear of a commuting nightmare, large numbers of Londoners duly trudged into work, umbrellas doubtless tucked under arms.
There are also signs that the fight for the British people’s loyalties is underway, with momentous consequences for the United States and its other allies. Appeasement was quickly out of the blocks from predictable sources. From the pages of the Guardian and some of the tabloids, from the left-wing benches in the House of Commons, the Spirit of Madrid was mobilizing. But there were encouraging signs, too. Shrewder readers of the British mindset were not willing to take a chance on a supine response, and the tendency to indulge in self-blame was decidedly limited. Ken Livingstone, the left-wing mayor of London, an apologist for terrorism in the past, spoke for decent people everywhere when he denounced the attacks and made no attempt to ape his fellow lefties in blaming the United States and British governments for them.
It was striking that even the BBC dropped its prissy use of politically correct language and broke new ground by calling the terrorists “terrorists.”
It is too early to conclude that the London attacks will lead to increased support for the war in Iraq and the broader war on terror. But the emerging reality of the British response is that, whatever they think about Iraq (most still think the war a mistake, according to polls), they understand clearly what is at stake. They understand that the perpetrators of this horror have, by dint of their very actions, proved that they have no cause that should be appeased. That giving in to the kind of blackmail that makes its case by taking lives and limbs is a sure route to national self-destruction.
As the London News Review, not known for showing much support for President Bush or Tony Blair, put it, with a Londoner’s characteristic taste for the Anglo-Saxon, in a “Letter to the Terrorists”:
“If this is a message to Tony Blair, we’ve got news for you. We don’t much like our government ourselves, or what they do in our name. But, listen very clearly. We’ll deal with that ourselves. We’re London, and we’ve got our own way of doing things, and it doesn’t involve tossing bombs around where innocent people are going about their lives. And that’s because we’re better than you. Everyone is better than you. . . . So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your a–holes, and get the f–out of our city.”
A contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, Gerard Baker is an assistant editor at the London Times.
