Thank you for your post. You speak a grim truth that most are not willing to acknowledge, but it did me good to read it. I have often felt fear, gloom and bitterness over the past three and a half years, but you have reminded me that I should not despair.

And thanks Jonathan for the Union Jack on the site. I’m not British, and the Union Jack only takes up a corner of my Australian flag, but I am a Londoner and care deeply about Britain and I was heartened by your expression of solidarity.

Charles

I suspect what needs to be said most clearly & most often are the stated aims of the terrorists, put into a chronology of attacks. Also journalists who so glibly discuss Bush’s unilateralism should put that in the context of the oil-for-food scandal. I realize this is a painfully obvious comment but contexts are seldom given–not much more often by hawks than the doves. (Of course, both are often implicit in hawkish arguments.)

Despite our massive effort to protect civilians from the reach of the GWOT, the plain fact is that our adversary is cunning, capable, and utterly dedicated to their cause, and their cause, unlike wars in the past, includes their willingness to sacrifice their own life en masse to achieve their goal of the restoration of the Caliphate. Victor Davis Hanson and Bernard Lewis have outlined this point well.

My respect to the Brits: chin up, and carry on.

My loathing to the likes of Chomsky, Ward Churchill, Democracy Now! (what a lie), Amy Goodman, and the sad spectacle of idiot congressmen in the US who have lost their perspective due entirely to their hatred of President Bush.

Speaking of which, thank you Mr. President. Prosecuting a war is never an exercise in perfection, and war is one series of FUBARS after another, but I am thankful that you are at the helm.

For instance, it didn’t work for the Red Brigades in Italy.

I wonder if Mr. Rockford is on the same planet as we in Britain? Whereas I tend to agree with him in our Government’s supine submission to the IRA and SinnFein, which turned out to be a disaster for democracy, with murderers walking the streets and little achieved for that action, there won’t be anything similar happening in regard to the bombings on 7/7! The effect on British public opinion of these atrocties will be to reinforce our opposition to all and any fundamentalist terrorist acts, and to go slowly about the task of bringing to justice the clowns who perpetrated these mindless acts of terror!
The idea of George Brown actually seated alongside Galloway is so far away from reality, I wonder if Mr. Rockford actually knows anything about U.K. politics at all!
I opposed, and continue to oppose, the Iraqi war, but British soldiers will remain alongside their American comrades until the Iraqi government states that they are ready to be relieved, and to even suggest anything to the contrary is to totally misunderstand the ethos of the British military presence in Iraq!
As for Sharia Law, well, our Common Law has been good enough for Britain for the past eight hundred years, and it will take a little more than four bombs from a bunch of mad rag-heads to remove the protections afforded us by that Law!
As a final comment, I seem to recall that large sums of cash were donated on an extremely regular basis by Irish-Americans and their sympathisers, ostensibly to be sent for the families of the ‘victims’ of British brutality in Northern Ireland, but actually to help buy arms and explosives for the ‘Struggle’; and it wasn’t until 9/11 did the USA Government officially wise up to the fact that the IRA and their brothers in Sinn Fein were nothing more than common-or-garden crooks, murderers and terrorists after power, money and control over a part of the British Isles. I wonder how he came to forget that little piece of American history?

If this culture of complacency and co-dependency among the terrorist’s co-religionists does not reform itself, there is a very real prospect of the conflict expanding from a war between terrorists and officials of governments, to a war between civilians of one religion and everyone else.

Within a month Blair will be ousted, Brown taking over, with George Galloway as Interior Minister. Britain will withdraw from Iraq AND Afghanistan, apologize to bin Laden, call for a return of Saddam and the Taliban, and institute Sharia Law for Muslim Family disputes as Canada does.

That’s just a given. Terrorism ALWAYS works. It worked for Gerry Adams, Yasir Arafat, Osama (made him a legend), Shamil Besayev (Beslan was a total triumph for him, he showed Putin to be unable to save even toddlers and impressed the hard boys with his own brutality). Terrorism worked in Kenya (Mau-Mau), in Algeria, in Beirut, in Palestine (the Munich Massacre directly led to UN applause for Arafat and massive sympathy for the PLO).

Remember Red Ken says it’s OK when Muslims blow up Jews in Israel. It depends who is on the bus (Red Ken defends the kind of bombing done in London just so long as it’s Jews dying).

The only instance of terror not working was the OAS, where the French were just so tired that they let De Gaulle do whatever it took (killing most of them basically) to make the OAS stop.

That’s understandable. It costs money, time, effort, lives, and civil liberties to defeat terrorism. That’s why Gerry Adams and the Omagh bombers went unpunished. Peace process don’t you know. I’m sure nothing very bad will happen to the surviving 7/7 bombers.

Anyway, Blair is toast. Already Londoners are saying the bombing was deserved. That dynamic won’t change until a major UK city is nuked as the terrorists inevitably escalate both demands and attacks. Who would have thought in August 2000 that terrorists would fly planes into the WTC and Pentagon?

As a state’s-rights Republican I have one real concern: in short, if the federal government has to fund an unbudgeted, emergency mandate for the security of urban mass-transit infrastructure then the terrorists have taken a pretty big bite out of us.

I’m not saying don’t respond forcefully, I’m just saying that when deciding whether the attack was successful, the jury’s still out and I hope that it’ll add-up all the long-term costs. If the attack on London’s public transit system becomes the justification for saddling the Federal government with the open-ended liability of funding select states’ urban security projects, then the attack could be called a success. $800 million or more redistributed to coastal urban states for their cities’ “first responders” means that much less for the nation’s urban schools, missile defense and border patrol.
-Steve

Well done.

How many hundreds of thousands protested against the ‘illegal and immoral’ Iraq war? What about the pathetic spectacle of Kenneth Bigley? Or the supine behavior of British politicians towards the relatively small Muslim population of Britain with regards to that absurd Hatred Law?

This bombing happened in a state of heightened security, 4 years after 9/11. According to British Intelligence, none of the people they were ‘watching’ had anything to do with this. That’s worrisome.

WW2 was a long time ago and a lot can change in 60 years. Give the Brits a week. Then we can probably make some cursory judgements as to how this will play out. The Georgeous One is already flapping his jaws. I think it’s a precursor.

The West is ill. I think it’s questionable if we’re up to snuff.

They didn’t win anything today, and this attack may end up making things even worse for them in the long run.

By now, most I assume have already watched/read/heard about the bombing incidents in London today. One writeup by Lex of the Chicago Boyz, I think, sums things up the best. I’ll just copy the post in its entirety here:This is going to be a long war. De…

And when the friendly face of the law is hit, who with a heart can resist feeling that tug? But the good cop won’t be kept down, no sir. You see, he is still a cop, with a job and a steely resolve. Not for nothing are Bulldogs the mascots of the Brit…

And when the friendly face of the law is hit, who with a heart can resist feeling that tug? But the good cop won’t be kept down, no sir. You see, he is still a cop, with a job and a steely resolve. Not for nothing are Bulldogs the mascots of the Brit…

“So never kick a dog because he’s just a pup/
We’ll fight like twenty armies and we won’t give up/
So you better run for cover when the pup grows up!”

Perhaps now these jihadis will learn that they’re not called Bulldogs for nothing. And with the Eagle flying overhead, they’d better run for cover!