In the hours after the Thursday-morning bombings in London, it seemed as if everyone was on the streets, walking home.
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One early casualty, for instance, was “The Power of Nightmares,” an influential three-part BBC series that argued that Al Qaeda does not exist, except as a kind of collective hallucination on the part of American neoconservatives. This hypothesis, and, with it, the theory that the terrorist threat was manufactured or hyped, had become extremely powerful on the respectable left. To be fair, the show’s producers never argued that there were no Islamist terrorists—their argument was, instead, that there was no coördinated network of terrorists run by an old Man of the Mountain in hiding. But the popular, anti-Blair, dinner-table view had long ago become that the terrorist threat was exaggerated, or that it wasn’t immediate. That view was destroyed in a morning.
Yet the antiwar left (and right) did not hesitate to blame Blair and Bush for what had happened in London. The bizarre left-wing M.P. George Galloway was the first off the mark, insisting within hours that the bombings were the inevitable payback for the war in Iraq. He was so clearly lacking in tact and a sense of fitness that no one took him seriously. But serious people quickly made the same argument; as early as Friday morning, journalists like Tariq Ali, in the Guardian, were saying flatly that what had happened had happened because Britain was in Iraq. The United States and Britain began the war in Iraq with the certainty, the argument goes, that they would cause many civilian casualties in pursuit of their political goal, and that the response, however brutal and inhumane, is part of the normal calculations of organized violence.
Against this argument is the view that the new kind of terrorism is essentially nihilist and apocalyptic, and that Iraq is only a kind of inchoate excuse. “After all, the African embassy bombings happened before Iraq,” Mark Urban, the diplomatic editor of the BBC program “Newsnight,” said. “The I.R.A. had a political arm, and a political goal, however unreal: they killed to get people to the table. What is there to negotiate with these people? An end to the American presence in Saudi Arabia? All right, we’ll consider it. The elimination of the State of Israel? Hmm, that may be a bit more difficult. The restoration of a universal Islamic caliphate? It may be a bit of a deal-breaker, that. This is not a program, really. It’s a wraparound justification for a violence whose real end is the expiation of shame through massacre.”
Of course, the worst of both readings of what is happening is surely true. The terrorists are psychopathic and shrewd, nihilist and rational, glorying in death for death’s sake while still calculating whom to kill, with what effect, when. Will this epoch, which began on 9/11 and had a new chapter written on 7/7, end only with the apocalyptic defeat of one side or another, or will it end, as all previous terrorisms have, with unspoken concession and quiet remedy and pointed police action and the workings of time and politics? This isn’t an argument that can be ended or resolved, in London or anywhere else, anytime soon. But at least it is an argument, and at least in London they weren’t afraid to have it.
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