E-Mail This Article to a Friend London calling The terror threat is real, it just wasn’t where Bush said it was

Those of us who oppose President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq would do well to remember that last week’s London bombings are only the most recent attack on the West by fundamentalist Islamists.

The radical Muslim war on democracy and secular values began in earnest in 1993 with the first, unsuccessful attempt to destroy New York’s World Trade Center. Plans had also been drafted to detonate two New York tunnels and a bridge. Two years later, bombers staged a series of lethal terror attacks between July and October in Paris; and, according to The Secret Archives of Al Qaeda, by Roland Jacquard, a bin Laden deputy traveled secretly through Europe in 1996-’97 to organize other terror cells.

The March 2004 bombings in Madrid, like the London attacks, were clearly triggered by our ill-conceived war in Iraq. Some sort of successful settlement there would certainly help to bring the international terror threat into more accurate focus. The arrogance and deception with which Bush and his band of brigands — Vice-President Richard Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and political adviser Karl Rove, to name just four of the most prominent — prosecute and defend their war dumbs down our understanding of terror, just as it pollutes our politics and compromises our respect in the eyes of the world.

The Islamist-terror masters are true believers, fanatics who would just as soon see Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Hindus, agnostics and atheists die if they don’t convert. In their view, gay love is an outrage, women little more than chattel. Free speech is decadent. Israel has no right to exist. And America is the great Satan. Whatever the outcome and duration of the war in Iraq, these views will not change. Bush is incidental to their view that the world should be a Koran-thumping place.

The great unspoken consideration in any discussion of US policy in the Middle East is oil. That — not human rights — is the principal reason we committed ground forces to the region during the first Gulf War in 1991, and that’s why our men and women are there today. Oil fuels the world economy. It is the lubricant of Western prosperity. Even the destitute among us live better than their counterparts in less-developed countries in large part because of oil. But until we adopt viable, alternative sources of energy, our fate is going to be interwoven with the reactionary, medieval visions of Muslim extremists. Our deaths are their glory.

That makes the news from Great Britain — that the London blasts were the work of homegrown suicide bombers — disturbing in the extreme. The left-wing Guardian, which opposes the Iraq war and Great Britain’s involvement in it, called the news "the worst of all possible outcomes." When considering the bombings in France and Spain, those trying to make sense of the dastardly acts could find at least some peace of mind in the fact that the perpetrators were foreign born, products of cultures very different from their own. It would be naive to assume that Europe’s various nationalities view their Muslim populations with widespread warmth and equanimity. England’s multiethnic and multicultural society, however, is Europe’s most tolerant and inclusive. As such, it was visibly shaken.

At this point in time, the greatest challenge terrorists pose is not to our physical well-being — as real as that may be. Rather, it is to our self-confidence, which their barbarous acts are designed to corrode. Our strength is our weakness. Open societies are more vulnerable to attack than closed systems. Britain, which before last week’s attacks suffered through years of bombings and assassinations by the Irish Republican Army, is already the free world’s most watched nation, with more than four million closed-circuit TV cameras deployed in public spaces for round-the-clock surveillance. That’s one for every 14 people. Liberty, a civil-liberties group, projects that Londoners are on camera as often as 300 times a day. That wasn’t enough to stop the bombers, although it must be said that it appears to have facilitated the early stages of the investigation.

The attacks have breathed new life into a controversial proposal to issue national-identity cards. It is a curiosity of English political life that it is Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour Party that favors the measure, while it is viewed with suspicion by the Conservatives. New Labour appears more authoritarian than the Thatcherless Conservatives. In the wake of the bombings, Labour has been looser with talk about the possible need to curtail future civil liberties. It’s enough to bring a smile to a stone-cold terrorist’s lips.

The need, the urge, the pressure to do almost anything in the wake of the series of coordinated attacks that rocked London is understandable. Do any of us in the US really feel any safer since the passage, in the wake of 9/11, of the so-called Patriot Act? The recent reports by USA Today that the Coast Guard, charged with protecting our shores, is suffering alarming rates of malfunction among its aging ships and aircraft is certainly no cause for comfort. In both nations, we seem to have forgotten the wisdom of our grandparents, which held that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

The trend in this country toward restricting the ability of the press to do its job certainly does little to promote democracy, which is, after all, what the terrorists want to destroy. The mainstream press, now for all intents and purposes an arm of the corporate conglomerates that fare so well under Bush, may have itself to blame for much of the low regard in which it is held by the American public. But will that public really be better served by putting reporters in jail for doing their jobs? As anyone who pays the slightest attention to the news knows, that’s what’s already happened. Judith Miller of the New York Times is behind bars, and Time magazine caved and turned over the notes of one of its reporters to the seemingly out-of-control special prosecutor who is investigating the leak to right-wing columnist Robert Novak that the wife of a diplomat who dared to publicly question the motives of the White House’s Iraq policy was a CIA operative.

The leak may not be the gravest threat to our national security, but it was low-down and despicable, not to mention illegal. So it comes as no surprise that Karl Rove is now known to be lurking somewhere at the bottom of this uncomfortable woodpile. That he is involved is no longer in question. What is unclear is just what role Rove played in this unsavory affair. Although their motives and weapons are very different, the damage that Bushies like Rove inflict our political culture is just as real as anything the terrorists think up. We are, at times, our own worst enemies.

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