I think we were all pretty shocked (although it shouldn't have surprised us one bit) that the London bombers were all native Brits.
Here's the Telegraph's sharp columnist Matthew d'Ancona on facing the days after 7/7:
[...]
But the arguments that follow will be conducted in a new and awful context: namely, the absolute, incontrovertible knowledge, spelt out in the blood of Londoners, that this war is now being waged in our very midst. "It is a war," one Cabinet minister said to me. "People didn't believe that till last Thursday. But they do now."
I hope he is right. This war, of course, is like nothing that has preceded it, which is why it is so tempting to call it something else: a criminal conspiracy, or a series of isolated atrocities carried out by psychopathic mavericks. And yet the analysis that the President and Prime Minister offered after 9/11 now seems more pertinent than ever.
We face three, inextricably linked threats: from Islamist fanatics, from the rogue states that harbour them, and from the deadly weapons which they seek to acquire. Only three months ago, Kamel Bourgass was jailed for 17 years for plotting to unleash ricin on London's streets. Bourgass failed. On July 7, Hasib Hussain, Shehzad Tanweer, Mohammed Sadique Khan and another man succeeded with conventional explosive. What if it had been the other way round?
Alas, these grim realities have been obscured for almost three years by the tangled arguments over the liberation of Iraq. At precisely the moment that it should have been looking outward with ever greater vigilance, the British polity turned in on itself. "Iraq" became political shorthand - like "spin" or "sleaze" - a metaphor for all that was objectionable about Mr Blair and his Government. The horizons of British politics narrowed dangerously.
Ironically, it has taken a local event to remind us of the global nature of this conflict, its pervasiveness, and our consequent inability to escape its consequences simply by blaming this or that head of government. Does anyone seriously believe that 52 more Londoners would be alive today if Gordon Brown were Prime Minister, and John Kerry were President? The question is so absurd that it scarcely merits a response.
Yet this was precisely the logic applied in the aftermath of the Iraq war. Get rid of Bush and Blair, and the bloodshed will stop. The Spanish tested that logic to destruction after the Madrid bombing and discovered, to their horror, that the jihadis carried on plotting their atrocities.
The Iraq war was grotesquely caricatured in this country as a symptom of the Prime Minister's political infatuation with George W Bush, even as a demented outburst of Christian adventurism.
It came to be viewed almost as an abstraction, a symbol of Mr Blair's mad itch to intervene, a quarrel in a far away country of which we know nothing. But everyone knows the London Underground map, and everyone can point now to the stations that bear fresh blood stains. The war on terror has come home.
In truth, it was always here.
In this conflict, everything is, and will be, connected. There is still much glee at the failure of the Iraq Survey Group to unearth Saddam's weapons. I would have thought a more pertinent question - and a terrifying one - is where, exactly, all those weapons are?
[No kidding.
I've been asking myself that question since April of 2003.--Jen]
That is, the 3.9 tons of VX gas, 8,500 litres of anthrax, 550 artillery shells containing mustard gas and other nasties that the Iraqi dictator himself admitted to producing in the 1990s, but are still officially "unaccounted for".
I am not saying that these unspeakable weapons have found their way into the hands of the disaffected young jihadis of West Yorkshire. But it requires only a small leap of imagination to conclude that there must be many other young men like them, in cities and mountain hideouts around the world, working desperately hard to lay their hands on these and similar tools of destruction.
Although the New Labour knee has not yet jerked, the contours of future action are already clear. The Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary have all been in Brussels this week seeking European co-operation on counter-terrorism.
Ministers mutter about the need to transform judicial culture tout court, and the heavy burden upon Lord Phillips of Matravers, who becomes Lord Chief Justice in September, to ensure that the courts deport those who should be deported.
Be in no doubt: the Government is braced for the worse. "If this is a one-off, we'll be all right," one of the Prime Minister's closest allies told me. "But if there are other incidents we have a very big problem."
[...]
Therein lay the seed of a huge and necessary debate on the proper balance between security and liberty in this country. But that debate will now be carried out in the proper context. This is not about party politics, Mr Blair's future, or the Iraq war.
It is about what a civilised society does to confront those who will do anything to themselves, and to others, in the name of a murderous mission that knows no limit.
Sobering, but necessary talk for both Britain and the U.S.
America, too, is still having the "debate" about the proper balance between security and liberty as the Patriot Act is up for renewal and has yet to be voted on.
My representatives had better darn sure vote for it or there'll be hell to pay from me!
We've been in a real war since 9/11, but it's good to know that the UK and America stand together as allies and that Britain stood with us shoulder-to-shoulder long before she was attacked.
Tony Blair's wrong about a lot of things, but he was right about fighting the WOT while preserving the Special Relationship.
May God grant us, the lovers of Life, victory over these IslamoNazi lovers of death.
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