The London bombings

Sudden explosions. People left dead, wounded and traumatized. Innnocent people killed and injured for no good reason. It's a terrible, terrible thing.

When I read about the London attacks this morning, the words from the Jackson Browne song "For a Dancer" came to mind.

Keep a fire for the human race
Let your prayers go drifting into space
You never know what will be coming down
Perhaps a better world is drawing near
Just as easily it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found

For the survivors of those killed, there will be a long period of mourning and arranging of the lost one's affairs. For many of the survivors, the physically wounded, the psychologically injured, there will be months or years of recovery. For many, their lives will be permanently affected by the attacks.

I wish it were possible to draw a line under the events or to put a period at this point. But, being human, we try to find meaning in things like this, even when there is none to be found.

And having watched the reaction to the 11-M (March 11) attacks of 2004 in Madrid, it's all too predictable that the Foxists and the OxyContin radio blatherers will turn this into another justification for the Iraq War and whatever other Bush policies they are promoting at the moment. Oh, and use it to call Democrats traitors, of course. That's what our national political discourse has come to at this point.

My initial thoughts on the policy issues run like this. We know terrorist groups are trying to get nuclear weapons and radioactive material, so nuclear nonproliferation should be in reality (and not just in rhetoric) a top priority of American policy.

There should also be a serious push to upgrade security in American ports, a major point of vulnerability. And we need to have a public health system that has the emergency capacity to deal with a nuclear attacks or an epidemic induced by biological weapons.

And the government at all levels in the US should be prepared to deal with terrorist networks - and not just jihadists. Cults and violent political extremist groups that are not Islamic in orientation can commit deadly attacks on their own or in a cynical/pragmatic alliance with jihadist groups. As I mentioned in a recent post, such alliances are not only possible but likely.

The more time that goes by, the more mindless it seems to me to approach this problem as a so-called "global war on terrorism" (GWOT). The threat to the US and other Western democracies is not the group of techniques of warfare known collectively as "terrorism." It's the specific groups and political environments that promote violent attacks on democratic countries. The Islamic jihadists are the most urgent of those threats. But by no means the only ones. While the Bush administration uses The Terrorists as an abstract threat to justify anything and everything it wants to do, there are real terrorists that are real threats to the US and to American citizens.

So we should be asking again, why did this administration allow Bin Laden and many of the senior Al Qaeda operatives of the moment to escape during the Battle of Tora Bora? When is our Justice Department, now headed by a man (Alberto Gonzales) who facilitated a criminal torture policy, going to solve the anthrax case from 2001, a case in which the number of likely suspects is limited to a well-defined and known circle of experts?

Is the government ever going to prosecute and convict any terrorists on anything more substantial than being low-level "sleepers", or on immigration status violations (which are counted as "terrorist"-related to create phony statistics)?

And do we have an actual long-term policy to address issues with the Muslim world? Or is it all based on threatening preventive war against Muslim countries and making pretty noises about promoting democray while "rendering" suspects to authoritarian Muslim governments like Egypt's and Syria's to be tortured?

[Cross-posted at Old Hickory's Weblog]

Tags: london bombing 2005