Perspectives
on terrorism

It's safe to say that the driver of the car packed with explosives that was found in central London early Friday morning was not a very impressive terrorist. Driving erratically down Haymarket at 1.30 in the morning in a big, shiny Mercedes, crashing it into a garbage bin, getting out and running away -- it all suggests that he didn't pay proper attention back in terrorist school.

Maybe he was just overcome by the fumes, but the other terrorist didn't do much better. He managed to park his explosives-packed car in Cockspur St. -- but he parked illegally, so it was ticketed and towed away.

It's also safe to say that this incident will be taken more seriously in the United States than it is in Britain itself or anywhere else in Europe. Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued the obligatory statement that Britain faces "a serious and continuous threat" and that the public "need to be alert" at all times, but there were none of the attempts to use it as justification for Britain's supporting role in the US invasion of Iraq that would have been automatic when Tony Blair was running the show.

Blair has gone off to bring peace to the Middle East as the special envoy of the Quartet (the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia). It would be a hopeless task at the moment even for someone respected by all sides, which is why the job had been left empty since the last "special envoy," former World Bank president James.

Wolfensohn, resigned in frustration in early 2006 -- and Wolfensohn (who hadn't even invaded Iraq) genuinely did have the respect of all sides.

But Blair didn't want to fade away gracefully. He wanted the job, and his pal George Bush twisted arms until the other members of the Quartet gave in, reasoning that he couldn't do that much harm when there's no hope anyway. After all, if a Borgia can become pope, why can't Tony Blair be a peace envoy? The British Foreign Office is said to be in an "institutional sulk" and the Russians nearly vetoed the appointment, but it doesn't really matter much. Neither does the car-bomb that was abandoned in central London.

If the silver Merc that was left in Haymarket had actually exploded and killed some people it would not be an appropriate time to say this, but an occasional terrorist attack is one of the costs of doing business in the modern world. You just have to bring a sense of proportion to the problem, and in general people in Europe do.

Most major European countries had already been through some sort of terrorist crisis well before the current fashion for "Islamist" terrorism: the IRA in Britain, the OAS in France, ETA in Spain, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, the Brigate Rossi and their neo-fascist counterparts in Italy. Most European cities have also been heavily bombed in a real war within living memory, which definitely puts terrorist attacks into a less impressive category. So most Europeans, while they dislike terrorist attacks, do not obsess about them: they know that they are likelier to win the lottery than to be hurt by terrorists.

Russians are pretty cool about the occasional terrorist attacks linked to the war in Chechnya, and Indians are positively heroic in their refusal (most of the time) to be panicked by terrorist attacks that have taken more lives there than all the attacks in the West since terrorist techniques first became widespread in the 1960s. In almost all of these countries, despite the efforts of some governments to convince the population that terrorism is an existential threat of enormous size, the vast majority of the people don't believe it.

Whereas in the United States, most people do believe it. A majority of Americans have finally figured out that the invasion of Iraq really had nothing to do with fighting terrorism, but they certainly have not understood that terrorism itself is only a minor threat. There has been only one major terrorist attack in the United States since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and that one, on 9/11, is now almost six years in the past. So how have Americans been persuaded that their duty and their destiny in the 21st century is to lead the world in a titanic, globe-spanning "long war" against terrorism?

Inexperience is one reason: American cities have never been bombed in war, so Americans have no standard of comparison that would shrink terrorism to its true importance in the scale of threats that face any modern society. But the other is relentless official propaganda: the Bush administration has built its whole brand around the "war on terror" since 2001, so the threat must continue to be seen as huge and universal.

Ridiculous though it sounds to outsiders, Americans are regularly told that their survival as a free society depends on beating the "terrorists." They should treat those who say such things as fools or deliberate liars not worthy of a moment's attention, but they don't. Which is why the manipulators of public opinion in the White House and the US media will give bigger play to the London bombing-that-wasn't than Britain's own government and media will.

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