Thread: The quiet-life option ensures that attacks go on

The quiet-life option ensures that attacks go on
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 08/07/2005)

One way of measuring any terrorist attack is to look at whether the killers accomplished everything they set out to. On September 11, 2001, al-Qa'eda set out to hijack four planes and succeeded in seizing every one. Had the killers attempted to take another 30 jets between 7.30 and nine that morning, who can doubt that they'd have maintained their pristine 100 per cent success rate? Throughout the IRA's long war against us, two generations of British politicians pointed out that there would always be the odd "crack in the system" through which the determined terrorist would slip. But on 9/11 the failure of the system was total.

Yesterday, al-Qa'eda hit three Tube trains and one bus. Had they broadened their attentions from the central zone, had they attempted to blow up 30 trains from Uxbridge to Upminster, who can doubt that they too would have been successful? In other words, the scale of the carnage was constrained only by the murderers' ambition and their manpower.

The difference is that 9/11 hit out of the blue - literally and politically; 7/7 came after four years of Her Majesty's Government prioritising terrorism and "security" above all else - and the failure rate was still 100 per cent. After the Madrid bombing, I was struck by the spate of comic security breaches in London: two Greenpeace guys shin up St Stephen's Tower, a Mirror reporter blags his way into a servants' gig at Buckingham Palace a week before Bush comes to stay; an Osama lookalike gatecrashes Prince William's party.

As I wrote in The Daily Telegraph last March, "History repeats itself: farce, farce, farce, but sooner or later tragedy is bound to kick in. The inability of the state to secure even the three highest-profile targets in the realm - the Queen, her heir, her Parliament - should remind us that a defensive war against terrorism will ensure terrorism."

To three high-profile farces, we now have that high-profile tragedy, of impressive timing. It's not a question of trying and prodding and testing and finding the weak link in the chain, the one day - on Monday or Wednesday, in January or November, when an immigration official or a luggage checker is a bit absent-minded and distracted and you slip quietly through. Instead, the jihad, via one of its wholly owned but independently operated subsidiaries, scheduled an atrocity for the start of the G8 summit and managed to pull it off - at a time when ports and airports and internal security were all supposed to be on heightened alert. That's quite a feat.

Of course, many resources had been redeployed to Scotland to cope with Bob Geldof's pathetic call for a million anti-globalist ninnies to descend on the G8 summit. In theory, the anti-glob mob should be furious with al-Qa'eda and its political tin ear for ensuring that their own pitiful narcissist protests - the pâpier-maché Bush and Blair puppets, the ethnic drumming, etc - will be crowded off the news bulletins.

But I wonder. It seems just as plausible that there will be as many supple self-deluding figures anxious to argue that it's Blair's Iraq war and the undue attention it invites from excitable types that's preventing us from ending poverty in Africa by the end of next week and all the other touchy-feely stuff. The siren songs of Bono and Geldof will be working hard in favour of the quiet-life option. There is an important rhetorical battle to be won in the days ahead. The choice for Britons now is whether they wish to be Australians post-Bali or Spaniards post-Madrid.

That shouldn't be a tough call. But it's easy to stand before a news camera and sonorously declare that "the British people will never surrender to terrorism". What would you call giving IRA frontmen offices at Westminster? It's the target that decides whether terror wins - and in the end, for all the bombings, the British people and their political leaders decided they preferred to regard the IRA as a peripheral nuisance which a few concessions could push to the fringe of their concerns.

They thought the same in the 1930s - back when Czechoslovakia was "a faraway country of which we know little". Today, the faraway country of which the British know little is Britain itself. Traditional terrorists - the IRA, ETA - operate close to home. Islamism projects itself long-range to any point of the planet with an ease most G8 militaries can't manage. Small cells operate in the nooks and crannies of a free society while the political class seems all but unaware of their existence.

Did we learn enough, for example, from the case of Omar Sheikh? He's the fellow convicted of the kidnapping and beheading in Karachi of the American journalist Daniel Pearl. He's usually described as "Pakistani" but he is, in fact, a citizen of the United Kingdom - born in Whipps Cross Hospital, educated at Nightingale Primary School in Wanstead, the Forest School in Snaresbrook and the London School of Economics. He travels on a British passport. Unlike yours truly, a humble Canadian subject of the Crown, Mr Sheikh gets to go through the express lane at Heathrow.

Or take Abdel Karim al-Tuhami al-Majati, a senior al-Qa'eda member from Morocco killed by Saudi security forces in al Ras last April. One of Mr Majati's wives is a Belgian citizen resident in Britain. In Pakistan, the jihadists speak openly of London as the terrorist bridgehead to Europe. Given the British jihadists who've been discovered in the thick of it in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia, only a fool would believe they had no plans for anything closer to home - or, rather, "home".

Most of us can only speculate at the degree of Islamist penetration in the United Kingdom because we simply don't know, and multicultural pieties require that we keep ourselves in the dark. Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of Britain's Islamic Human Rights Commission, is already "advising Muslims not to travel or go out unless necessary, and is particularly concerned that women should not go out alone in this climate". Thanks to "Islamophobia" and other pseudo-crises, the political class will be under pressure to take refuge in pointless gestures (ie, ID cards) that inconvenience the citizenry and serve only as bureaucratic distractions from the real war effort.

Since 9/11 most Britons have been sceptical of Washington's view of this conflict. Douglas Hurd and many other Tory grandees have been openly scornful of the Bush doctrine. Lord Hurd would no doubt have preferred a policy of urbane aloofness, such as he promoted vis à vis the Balkans in the early 1990s. He's probably still unaware that Omar Sheikh was a westernised non-observant chess-playing pop-listening beer-drinking English student until he was radicalised by the massacres of Bosnian Muslims.

Abdel Karim al-Tuhami al-Majati was another Europeanised Muslim radicalised by Bosnia. The inactivity of Do-Nothin' Doug and his fellow Lions of Lethargy a decade ago had terrible consequences and recruited more jihadists than any of Bush's daisy cutters. The fact that most of us were unaware of the consequences of EU lethargy on Bosnia until that chicken policy came home to roost a decade later should be sobering: it was what Don Rumsfeld, in a remark mocked by many snide media twerps, accurately characterised as an "unknown unknown" - a vital factor so successfully immersed you don't even know you don't know it.

This is the beginning of a long existential struggle, for Britain and the West. It's hard not to be moved by the sight of Londoners calmly going about their business as usual in the face of terrorism. But, if the governing class goes about business as usual, that's not a stiff upper lip but a death wish.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m.../08/do0802.xml