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What's the Difference Between London and Baghdad?Vigilant traffic wardens, trusted police officers, and women who complain.
By Anne ApplebaumPosted Monday, July 2, 2007, at 8:10 PM ET
LONDON—"Yes, the Piccadilly Line is running slowly today, took me ages to get here." I first learned that someone had tried to set off two car bombs in London late last week from two women talking in a shop. Bits of the city center had been blocked off for a few hours that morning, they complained. So tiresome, especially on a Friday, when one had hoped to go home early. Thank goodness, someone else said later, that by afternoon the area was clear, and the Piccadilly Line—the Tube line that runs beneath the target site—was running normally. For many Londoners, discussion of the car bombs ended there.
Had the bombs actually gone off in the early morning hours, as planned, there could have been hundreds of casualties. One was parked near a packed nightclub; the other was nearby, in the center of the theater district. But this is a city that survived the IRA's terrorist campaign of the 1990s. It is also a city full of people who have to get to work in the morning, people who care quite a lot about traffic. I'm not going to lapse here into a string of clichés about British stoicism, but it really was a relief to encounter no hysteria whatsoever.
Related in Slate
Shortly after the July 7, 2005, attacks, David Plotz wrote two dispatches from London—one recounted the initial reactions on the ground, and one explored the dearth of shock among Londoners. Christopher Hitchens also observed a sense of expectancy in Britain after those attacks. In 2006, Daniel Benjamin compared the failed Heathrow Airport bomb plot with an earlier al-Qaida plot to blow up commercial jets. In 2001, Dahlia Lithwick examined the various anti-terrorism strategies in Western democracies, including Britain.
Since then, the country has experienced another terrorist attempt: On Saturday, two men tried, unsuccessfully, to ram a jeep filled with explosives into a Glasgow airport terminal. Clearly, the attacks were meant to be coordinated. Probably, they were meant to threaten the new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, who took office last week. But by any measure they failed, causing little physical or psychological damage. Given that cars packed with explosives are used with great "success" every day by insurgents in Iraq, where they wreak enormous havoc and leave people fearful and angry, it is worth asking why.
First, the London bombs failed because they were amateurish. The British branch of al-Qaida, or of al-Qaida imitators, does not have weapons of mass destruction, whether biological, chemical, or nuclear. Nor do they even have Semtex, the high-tech explosive favored by the IRA. If they have supporters in the governments or secret services of foreign countries, they aren't very resourceful supporters: The car bombs were made of ordinary propane gas and rusty nails. These turned out to be covered in fingerprints and other forensic evidence, enabling British police to carry out raids and arrests across the country over the weekend. It's likely that the perpetrators will have been filmed by one of central London's multiple video cameras as well: Though we sometimes think otherwise, Western technology is still far superior to the tools available to would-be terrorists.
More important, though, the London bombs failed because open, Western societies are more resilient than we sometimes think they are. The police found one of the Piccadilly car bombs because an ambulance crew, responding to an unrelated call, saw smoke seeping from its trunk and alerted the police. The other car was illegally parked, and London's supervigilant, much-hated traffic wardens towed it to a parking lot, where someone noticed that it smelled of gasoline and alerted the police. That Britain has functional ambulance services and working traffic wardens, all of whom are civic-minded enough to call the police when they suspect something is amiss, may not sound extraordinary. But these are precisely the kinds of institutions that are missing in many places, among them Baghdad, a city where parking isn't exactly a public preoccupation, and where the civic-minded avoid police who are, fairly or unfairly, suspected of everything from ethnic cleansing to taking bribes.
In Glasgow, Scotland, there was a similar story. The two men who drove their car into an airport door were stopped by police working together with pedestrians, one of whom wrestled the driver—who had just doused himself in gasoline—to the ground. The authorities weren't successful by themselves, in other words: The authorities were successful in conjunction with a supportive public. Again, this particular form of cooperation isn't available in many countries, and certainly not in Iraq, where the authorities don't enjoy the public's trust at all.
And the conclusion? The women in the shop were right. At least this time around, the correct reaction to the London bomb attempts was not to keep children home from school, not to call in sick at work, not to rush out and purchase duct tape, but to complain about the traffic. The London bombs are indeed an ominous reminder that the terrorist war on the West continues. They were also an excellent reminder that we—and our open societies and our liberal values—are still winning.
What's the Difference Between London and Baghdad?: Vigilant traffic wardens, trusted police officers, and women who complain.
Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book isGulag: A History.
Photograph of Glasgow Airport by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.
COMMENTS
Remarks from the Fray:
This article is completely thoughtless. These recent bombings failed because of dumb luck and the perpetrators' incompetence, and any attempt to draw larger lessons about Western society is fraught with moral consequences that Applebaum surely did not intend.
As a threshold matter, Applebaum's argument partly fails on its own terms. She says that the airport attack "by any measure ... failed." Well, yes, any measure except the burning jeep in the doorway that closed the airport and was still unapproachably dangerous hours later. The baggage handler who fought with the burning man was unquestionably a heroic fellow, but there's no indication that his intervention had anything to do with the jeep's failure to produce a larger explosion.
More generally, though, if the fact that the bombs don't go off is a tribute to Western civil society, what does that say about the occasions when a bomb does go off? The 7/7 bombs killed over 50 people -- by Applebaum's argument that represented a failure of British society. The Oklahoma City bombing would constitute a failure of that city's parking enforcement. And how would Applebaum's thesis, comparing car bombs in London to car bombs in Iraq, explain the fact that terrorists have seized airplanes as weapons in the US but not in Iraq? It's much too facile to take the good without the bad, to argue that when a bomb doesn't go off it's a tribute to our skill but when it does go off it's just bad luck.
Again, the people who risked their lives in London to stop these incidents were heroes, without question. But the fact that they were in a position to do so was just luck -- luck that the terrorists were so unskilled that they allowed smoke and gasoline odors to build up in the nightclub cars, or so addled that they didn't detonate their additional explosives in the airport car. To suggest otherwise demeans the people who have lost their lives to terrorism in the West.
I find the thinking in the Applebaum column on the London bombing attempts almost as worrisome as the incidents themselves. It's disturbing because it underestimates enemies and ignores what lies behind their commitment to destroy us. The writer's word "resilient" translates here as superior -- always a foolish notion. Rather than patting "the West" on the back for calling police after noticing smoke coming from a car trunk, shouldn't we be questioning why the bombers are so persistent, why they come from countries beyond the Middle East and why they include physicians among their ranks? What is it about this hate and ideology that can enlist people to kill who otherwise are pledged to help?
I can't help but feel a slight note of triumphalism in Anne Applebaum's 'voice' as I read this article. It is certainly true that the public reaction and the civic responsibility of the authorities and citizens was admirable. Indeed it made me feel deeply proud to be British. However to talk of 'winning' strikes me as premature: terrorism may have been thwarted on this occasion, but, to paraphrase the IRA's infamous words, if any of the various terrorist nut-jobs succeed only once then they have won a victory, whilst those trying to ward off terrorism are engaged in a struggle to stay even. The continuing threats posed by the extremist ideologies festering at the heart of many Muslim communities in the UK and the disastrous foreign policy path being taken, still hold true. Our 'liberal values' have been sacrificed in many instances by the state to appease the media and offer a perception that the government is being tough on terror. Only if the tenacity and relative restraint shown during the IRA bombing campaigns becomes the norm during these difficult triumphs will any kind of 'win' be conceivable. Alas, in the current climate that seems unlikely.
The war on terrorism is something of a joke. On the one side we have fanatics striking back at the west in some type of Arab/Muslim nationalism. On the other side, we have Western governments trying to do business with dysfunctional Middle Eastern countries.
The fanatics are idiots- apparently incapable of launching successful attacks against innocent citizens and the infrastructure they rely on. They can't win- even these acts are designed more to provoke than anything else. They really can't hurt us- even when they fly planes into buildings.
At the same time, there seems to be an endless supply of them- almost as though they were manufactured by these dysfunctional regimes. Whether they are our allies like Saudi Arabia, or our enemies like the Iranians, they hate the West. Muslim prejuidice against outsiders is their rallying cry.
I don't see a future in this, dogging the terrorist plots- no matter how feeble they are. Until we stop the Muslims from making this into a war against the west, they are winning, because it won't stop. A Muslim who advocates violence against westerners is a bad Muslim. Yet in Muslim countries, this type of thinking is condoned and nourished. Until that stops the west has a problem.
The only way to change this is to put pressure on these Muslim countries to change their ways- or eliminate them with superior force. Otherwise they will keep sending terrorists into the west. You can't win unless you can make them stop.
LONDON—"Yes, the Piccadilly Line is running slowly today, took me ages to get here." I first learned that someone had tried to set off two car bombs in London late last week from two women talking in a shop. Bits of the city center had been blocked off for a few hours that morning, they complained. So tiresome, especially on a Friday, when one had hoped to go home early. Thank goodness, someone else said later, that by afternoon the area was clear, and the Piccadilly Line—the Tube line that runs beneath the target site—was running normally. For many Londoners, discussion of the car bombs ended there.
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Remarks from the Fray:
This article is completely thoughtless. These recent bombings failed because of dumb luck and the perpetrators' incompetence, and any attempt to draw larger lessons about Western society is fraught with moral consequences that Applebaum surely did not intend.
As a threshold matter, Applebaum's argument partly fails on its own terms. She says that the airport attack "by any measure ... failed." Well, yes, any measure except the burning jeep in the doorway that closed the airport and was still unapproachably dangerous hours later. The baggage handler who fought with the burning man was unquestionably a heroic fellow, but there's no indication that his intervention had anything to do with the jeep's failure to produce a larger explosion.
More generally, though, if the fact that the bombs don't go off is a tribute to Western civil society, what does that say about the occasions when a bomb does go off? The 7/7 bombs killed over 50 people -- by Applebaum's argument that represented a failure of British society. The Oklahoma City bombing would constitute a failure of that city's parking enforcement. And how would Applebaum's thesis, comparing car bombs in London to car bombs in Iraq, explain the fact that terrorists have seized airplanes as weapons in the US but not in Iraq? It's much too facile to take the good without the bad, to argue that when a bomb doesn't go off it's a tribute to our skill but when it does go off it's just bad luck.
Again, the people who risked their lives in London to stop these incidents were heroes, without question. But the fact that they were in a position to do so was just luck -- luck that the terrorists were so unskilled that they allowed smoke and gasoline odors to build up in the nightclub cars, or so addled that they didn't detonate their additional explosives in the airport car. To suggest otherwise demeans the people who have lost their lives to terrorism in the West.
--Tom_Tildrum
(To reply, click here.)
I find the thinking in the Applebaum column on the London bombing attempts almost as worrisome as the incidents themselves. It's disturbing because it underestimates enemies and ignores what lies behind their commitment to destroy us. The writer's word "resilient" translates here as superior -- always a foolish notion. Rather than patting "the West" on the back for calling police after noticing smoke coming from a car trunk, shouldn't we be questioning why the bombers are so persistent, why they come from countries beyond the Middle East and why they include physicians among their ranks? What is it about this hate and ideology that can enlist people to kill who otherwise are pledged to help?
--jemezview
(To reply, click here.)
I can't help but feel a slight note of triumphalism in Anne Applebaum's 'voice' as I read this article. It is certainly true that the public reaction and the civic responsibility of the authorities and citizens was admirable. Indeed it made me feel deeply proud to be British. However to talk of 'winning' strikes me as premature: terrorism may have been thwarted on this occasion, but, to paraphrase the IRA's infamous words, if any of the various terrorist nut-jobs succeed only once then they have won a victory, whilst those trying to ward off terrorism are engaged in a struggle to stay even. The continuing threats posed by the extremist ideologies festering at the heart of many Muslim communities in the UK and the disastrous foreign policy path being taken, still hold true. Our 'liberal values' have been sacrificed in many instances by the state to appease the media and offer a perception that the government is being tough on terror. Only if the tenacity and relative restraint shown during the IRA bombing campaigns becomes the norm during these difficult triumphs will any kind of 'win' be conceivable. Alas, in the current climate that seems unlikely.
--C.Christmas
(To reply, click here.)
The war on terrorism is something of a joke. On the one side we have fanatics striking back at the west in some type of Arab/Muslim nationalism. On the other side, we have Western governments trying to do business with dysfunctional Middle Eastern countries.
The fanatics are idiots- apparently incapable of launching successful attacks against innocent citizens and the infrastructure they rely on. They can't win- even these acts are designed more to provoke than anything else. They really can't hurt us- even when they fly planes into buildings.
At the same time, there seems to be an endless supply of them- almost as though they were manufactured by these dysfunctional regimes. Whether they are our allies like Saudi Arabia, or our enemies like the Iranians, they hate the West. Muslim prejuidice against outsiders is their rallying cry.
I don't see a future in this, dogging the terrorist plots- no matter how feeble they are. Until we stop the Muslims from making this into a war against the west, they are winning, because it won't stop. A Muslim who advocates violence against westerners is a bad Muslim. Yet in Muslim countries, this type of thinking is condoned and nourished. Until that stops the west has a problem.
The only way to change this is to put pressure on these Muslim countries to change their ways- or eliminate them with superior force. Otherwise they will keep sending terrorists into the west. You can't win unless you can make them stop.
--allyra
(To reply, click here.)
(7/7)