Thoughts Spurred by London

Here is a summary of some of the main themes emerging in reaction to the London bombing. (For a compilation of some of the diverse Arab reactions, go here. My own thoughts are at the end of this post). There are many, like Mark Steyn and Christopher Hitchens, who point to the bombing as evidence that we in the West have let our vigilence slip. Victor Hanson and Wretchard at the Belmont Club agree, but Wretchard reminds that, though tragic, London should help us to refocus our attention.

The first and most important hard fact to grasp is that this Al Qaeda strike, their first against an Anglosphere city since 9/11, has caused much less damage than that on New York. This despite the fact that Al Qaeda has had nearly four years to brood on its humiliations and losses and to plot its revenge. The reasons for this are simple: the enemy is now operating in a much more hostile environment. The accessible methods of mass destruction, such as wide body aircraft, have been secured; not perfectly, but for a defense to work it must only be sufficient to blunt the onslaught of the enemy. Increased surveillance, tighter controls on movement, etc have all played their part. The second reason the enemy is weaker is Iraq. It is widely accepted that thousands of Al Qaeda fighters, the cream of their rancid crop, is fighting to expel the American infidel from the Land Between the Rivers. A moment's reflection will show that if they are there they cannot be elsewhere -- in London, Paris, Rome or Boston -- sowing bombs on buses and trains. Furthermore, fear in formerly smug circles within Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Libya at sharing the fate of Saddam have left terrorists have fewer powerful confederates. Thirdly, allied forces are in contact with the enemy all over the world, buying intelligence with their blood, just as a SEAL team in Afghanistan did. Nothing yields as much information as the act of grappling with the enemy. Liberals often talk about the need to improve intelligence capability without admitting that you can't gather it without being in action against the enemy.

The Al Qaeda have characterized the attack on London as 'punishment' for Britain's temerity to resist the inevitability of Islam. It is the kind of punishment these self-ordained masters of the universe are accustomed to meting out against harem women and insolent slaves. A few administered licks, and no doubt the cowardly kuffar will crawl back to his place. The tragedy is that Al Qaeda's perception is perfectly correct when applied to the Left, for whom no position is too supine, no degradation too shameful to endure; but incorrect for the vast majority of humans, in whom the instinct for self-preservation has not yet been extinguished. It will result in history's greatest case of mistaken identity; the mismatch that should never have happened. The enemy is even now dying at our feet, where we should kick him and kick him again.

Frank Gaffney, Jr. also offers some corrective actions and Andrew McCarthy (as mentioned by Don) focuses in on the missteps made by Tony Blair's government.

Despite this sort of reasoning, there are plenty of people, like Tariq Ali, who inevitably blame the Western involvement in Iraq as the acute cause of the London and Madrid attacks. This map reminds us that there was indeed terrorism before Iraq. Of course, that won't matter to those who share George Galloway's worldview. Others, like Josh Marshall, think Iraq is a mistake and waste of resources. Marshall also believes that the notion that fighting the terrorists in Iraq will preclude having to fight them in our own backyard has now been proven false. To this sort of "un-nuanced" thinking, Stephen Green offers a reminder to Marshall et al that sometimes "the bad guys shoot back."

Even in a cause as noble as the D-Day landings, the bad guys shot back. So effectively, in fact, that we suffered 10,000 casualties that day. Let me repeat: We suffered 10,000 casualties that day. The bad guys shot back in North Korea, too – to the tune of 36,000 dead Americans. They shot back in Vietnam for twelve years, until we finally got sick of the whole mess and let the bad guys take over.

(Joe Gandelman also offers a good defense of the Iraq-as-fly-paper theory). Marshall has recommendations, essentially defensive in nature:

The immediate answer to this is to hunt down the people immediately responsible, root out the primarily-non-state terror networks that support, plan and make these attacks possible and start getting about serious homeland defense -- port security, rail security, nuclear power plant security.

This common complaint implies that we can't both fight abroad and protect ourselves at home adequately and to my mind seems to echo the sort of zero-sum game economic thought that prevails on the Left. Green offers this corrective

The Army is in Iraq, not our local police forces. The CIA is focused on Iraq, not the FBI. The Air Force is patrolling Iraqi skies, not the Department of Homeland Security...

I'm going to repeat myself here, because it's a point I cannot repeat enough: Sometimes the bad guys shoot back. We're at war, and getting shot at is half of what war entails. And who says we aren't serious about homeland defense? Britain suffered an attack yesterday. Spain suffered an attack last year, and Indonesia before them. All bad jokes aside, we've been doing pretty well here at home since 9/11. I don't mean to preclude another massive attack on our soil, but events the last three years have shown that al Qaeda thinks other nations are easier marks than ours. By that measure, has the Bush Administration really been such a failure?

Finally, while this has indeed reminded us all that we are at war, Lee Harris thinks we may need to reevaluate the very nature of the conflict: we may be in error when we view this as a war. Instead, we are involved in a blood fued.

After the London bombing, I feel more than ever that the war model is deeply flawed, and that a truer picture of the present conflict may be gained by studying another, culturally distinct form of violent conflict, namely the blood feud.

In the blood feud, the orientation is not to the future, as in war, but to the past. In the feud you are avenging yourself on your enemy for something that he did in the past. Al Qaeda justified the attack on New York and Washington as revenge against the USA for having defiled the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia by its military presence during the First Gulf War. In the attack on London, the English were being punished for their involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the blood feud, unlike war, you have no interest in bringing your enemy to his knees. You are not looking for your enemy to surrender to you; you are simply interested in killing some of his people in revenge for past injuries, real or imaginary -- nor does it matter in the least whether the people you kill today were the ones guilty of the past injuries that you claim to be avenging. In a blood feud, every member of the enemy tribe is a perfectly valid target for revenge. What is important is that some of their guys must be killed -- not necessarily anyone of any standing in their community. Just kill someone on the other side, and you have done what the logic of the blood feud commands you to do.

In the blood feud there is no concept of decisive victory because there is no desire to end the blood feud. Rather the blood feud functions as a permanent "ethical" institution -- it is the way of life for those who participate in it; it is how they keep score and how they maintain their own rights and privileges. You don't feud to win, you feud to keep your enemy from winning -- and that is why the anthropologist of the Bedouin feud, Emrys Peters, has written the disturbing words: The feud is eternal...

Contemporary Islamic terrorism has permitted the ancient practitioners of the blood feud to introduce its brutal and primeval logic into a world of modern technology and parliamentary politics. The sooner we grasp this fact, the sooner we will be in a position to know our enemy for who he really is. Until then we will be as dazed and confused as those who, while peacefully riding a commuter train, suddenly find themselves bloodied and blackened, in the midst of maimed corpses and twisted steel, whispering to themselves over and over, "Why? Why?"

In the end, regardless of whether we call this a war or a blood feud, we must realize that Western Civilization is under attack. The first step is that we in the West have to be confident that our civilization is better than others in accomodating the beliefs and social practices of those who come from other "civilizations." Yes, we make mistakes, but Western Civilization continues to stand and strive for ideals and is uniquely willing to admit and navel-gaze when we fall short. As a result, the openness of our society and the tendency to engage in deep self-criticism has been used by the jihadists to expose and exploit political rifts, which I need not recount.

What is the answer? We have to presume that "our side" is in the right and rid ourselves of the one-way cynicism that correctly measures our actions against a Western "ideal" but does not hold our opponents to the same ideal. We must tone down the rhetoric and hyper-criticism that implies that the perfect war with no deaths, mistakes or miscalculations can be fought. We must resist the temptation to acquire short-term political advantage by engaging in hyperbole that not only weakens political opponents but weakens the moral standing of Western Civilization and the war effort in general. We must stop presuming conspiracies for oil, empire, etc. and be more willing to accept the genuiness of the actions and statements of our leaders: they are acting in what they believe to be the best interest of our respective nations and Western Civilizaton as a whole. We must not stop questioning our leaders when mistakes are made, but we also must be willing to accept their answers and not resort to yelling "You Lie!" and persist in a fantasy world of conspiracy in which we are in a "War for Oil" or bent on world empire or "hegemony."

We should not inflate the importance of the unfortunate instances where we fall short of our moral ideals to the point that the thus enlarged footprints of our failings stamp out the multitudinous, if softer, footprints made by our generous and tolerant society. Such instances, enhanced by hyperbole and charges of Western hypocrisy, are gleefully picked up and used as propaganda by our enemy. In fact, the moral relativists among us would do well to apply some relativistic thought in a comparison of the standing of the average men, women and children in Western society to those in the type of ideal Islamic society being championed by our enemy. Finally, while Western ideals, particularly the "ideology of Freedom," are worth spreading, we should be pragmatic in our analysis of the "what, where and how" of how best to accomplish a broader baseline of freedom. While it is unfortunate that freedom sometimes can only be nurtured after a regime is toppled via armed intervention, this should not be taken as an indication of the normal Western way of spreading freedom. Freedom can also be propogated through gradual reform in autocratic or oligarchic regimes. It shows a lack of nuance to think otherwise.

I still have a bumper sticker on my car that I purchased shortly after 9/11. It reads, "United We Stand." Though it's words are a bit faded, they are as important now as they were when they were printed. They are so simple and so plain and yet they convey such an important message. Who would have thought it would be so difficult for so many to heed them.