COMMENT Horror, anger, sadness, revulsion; and amid the kaleidoscope of swirling emotions, an awful reminder of our vulnerability. We should not have been surprised by the terrorist bombings in London. The British intelligence services have long talked about such an onslaught as a question of when rather than if. But apparent inevitability does nothing to diminish the feelings of shock and outrage.
The attack testified again to the jihadists’ acute grasp of time and place. Their terror is built around the propaganda of the deed, the strategy of the 19th-century anarchists who preached that each violent action could offer inspiration for the next. Madrid was bombed by al-Qaeda sympathisers 15 months ago on the eve of a Spanish general election. London’s turn came as Tony Blair, the prime minister, hosted the summit of the Group of Eight leaders at Gleneagles in Scotland.
These eight presidents and prime ministers are, in the shorthand of the times, the most powerful politicians on earth. They had gathered to transform the fortunes of Africa and to safeguard the future of the planet. The carnage in London was intended to tell us they are powerless.
News of the attacks reached the summit just as Mr Blair and George W. Bush, the US president, were standing before the television cameras. The irony perhaps was that this time the two leaders were not talking about defeating Islamist extremism; nor were they reaffirming their resolve against the insurgency in Iraq. The big subjects of this summit – aid for Africa and action to cool the planet – were chosen by Mr Blair deliberately to show that the west has a political agenda beyond what Mr Bush calls the war on terrorism.
There was another paradox. Less than 24 hours earlier, London had been named as the venue for the 2012 Olympic Games. Here was an unalloyed triumph for Mr Blair and a tribute to Britain’s capital city. But more than that, the choice of London marked the recognition by the International Olympic Committee of the city’s vibrant and effortless multiculturalism. The very same tolerance and diversity makes London an easy hiding place for extremists.
Mr Blair’s robust declaration that the west will not be cowed by such outrages, and the solidarity voiced by his fellow leaders in Gleneagles, mark genuine political resolve not to succumb to fear. There is nothing to separate the British prime minister and France’s Jacques Chirac or Germany’s Gerhard Schröder on this. But vital as it is, such defiant rhetoric also marks out the limits of their power.
The bombings, of course, will be followed by a necessary reappraisal of intelligence and other safeguards against such attacks. I suspect, too, that the government will find it easier in future to secure popular support for more drastic measures to question and detain terrorist suspects. As has been said before in this column, the benefits that might flow from such constraints on civil liberties are not unqualified. It is at moments like these, when the pressures are at their greatest, that politicians need to think hardest how much of our freedoms should be sacrificed to suicide bombers.
In any event, vital though it is, the fight on the ground against terrorists can only ever be half an answer. The experience since September 11 2001 testifies to both the strength and weakness of military victories. Western intelligence agents will tell you that most of the al-Qaeda figures behind the attacks on New York and Washington have been caught or isolated. But the jihadists have reinvented themselves as a series of loose, mutually reinforcing and quite separate networks. This is not an enemy that can be defeated on the battlefield.
It would be equally naive to say that politics holds all the answers. The brutal and, in western terms, fascist ambitions of the extreme jihadists stretch way beyond reasoned argument or political accommodation. Their ideology is indifferent to justice for the Palestinians, to peace in Chechnya, freedom and self-determination for Iraqis or self-government in Afghanistan. Force is an insufficient response to these people but it is probably the only one.
The role of politics is to starve them of recruits, to deprive them of the oxygen provided by a widespread perception of injustice and oppression in the Islamist world. If a settlement, say, between Israel and the Palestinians would not deter the present generation of terrorists, it might well set their sons and daughters on a different path.
What this demands of governments is the resolve to confront the complex, seemingly intractable challenges that most of the time it is more convenient to ignore.
It requires nation-building, mediation, conflict resolution, sustained aid flows, political courage and a willingness, sometimes, to compromise. It means sacrificing what may seem like today’s strategic and commercial interests to tomorrow’s imperatives – the spread of freedom and democracy among them.
All this says that the west will remain vulnerable to attack for many years to come. However much we might yearn for them, there are no quick fixes in a such a struggle. This is not a “war” but a much more profound clash of values.
The final irony of this week’s bombing outrage may be that it came at a moment when the leaders of the west began to show the smallest glimmers that they have begun to understand the scale of the task. After the ruptures and recriminations of recent years, even before the news of the attacks the atmospherics at the G8 summit had greatly improved.
When a senior French official can offer that the US administration has “moved significantly” in the effort to secure the albeit imperfect compromise on climate change, it means something.
The discussions on Iraq, the Middle East peace progress, nuclear profileration and the rest were by and large similarly measured. Arguments have been practical rather than ideological. Much of the discussion on Thursday was about how to ensure that Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is turned into a genuine opportunity for peace.
An absence of war among the world’s most powerful nations, though, is not enough. Missing still is the binding thread – the organising principle, if you like – that would bring coherence to their response to terrorism. American military power will not do it. Nor, on its own, will the “soft power” of the Europeans. Between the two, there might be an answer.
