After Madrid The attack in Madrid – or the impending atrocity in London that is predictable from its sucess – is likely to play differently here. I remember IRA bombs exploding in London in the 70s. Londoners were clear then that the attacks were intended to undermine support for a political process in Northern Ireland. They failed at that, though the IRA appears to be succeeding over the long term, as terrorists who can stay in business tend to do. (See Michael Vlahos: Terror's Mask and commentary.) The IRA bomb attacks failed because Londoners were clear what they were about and were not going to be cowed. That's how I think an al-Qaeda attack in London would play.
But nothing al-Qaeda might do will make our invasion of Iraq right in retrospect.
A separate question, which an attack might easily push aside, is how the war was sold to us. Whether you want/ed our troops in Iraq or not, you have to be concerned that the Prime Minister said on September 24th 2002:
His [Saddam's] WMD [weapons of mass destruction] programme is active, detailed and growing. The policy of containment is not working. The WMD programme is not shut down. It is up and running." He described the intelligence upon which his assertion was based as: "extensive, detailed and authoritative.
Saddam didn't have any weapons of mass destruction and the intelligence wasn't "authoritative". You have to be concerned about that, unless you think our invading Iraq more important (to us in the UK) than having a Prime Minister who is neither a knave nor a fool.
Our World Our Say is petitioning for an inquiry, not into the quality of the intelligence (another valid issue), but into whether it justified the case Blair made.
Posted by SJT at March 19, 2004 07:59 PM> But nothing al-Qaeda might do will make our invasion of Iraq right in retrospect.
as you know, on this subject we differ.
two very good articles from this week. the first, by david gelernter:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/920ygass.asp
and this one, from mark steyn:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/v3_entry_frames.htm (requires registration)
gelernter writes:
"Hitler was in a profoundly, fundamentally different league. And yet the distinction is unlikely to have mattered much to a Kurd mother watching her child choke to death on poison gas, or a Shiite about to be diced to bloody pulp. The colossal scale and the routine, systematic nature of torture and murder under Saddam puts him in a special category too. Saddam was small compared with Hitler, yet he was like Hitler not only in what he wanted but in what he did. When we marched into Iraq, we halted a small-scale holocaust.
"I could understand people disagreeing with this claim, arguing that Saddam was evil but not that kind of evil, not evil enough to deserve being discussed in those terms. But the opposition I hear doesn't dwell on the nature of Saddam's crimes. It dwells on the nature of America's--our mistakes, our malfeasance, our "lies." It sounds loonier and farther from reality all the time, more and more like the Holocaust Shrug.
"Turning away is not evil; it is merely human. And that's bad enough. For years I myself found it easy to ignore or shrug off Saddam's reported crimes. I had no love for Iraq or Iraqis. Before and during the war I wrote pieces suggesting that Americans not romanticize Iraqis; that we understand postwar Iraq more in terms of occupied Germany than liberated France. But during and after the war it gradually became impossible to ignore the staggering enormity of what Saddam had committed against his own people. And when we saw those mass graveyards and torture chambers, heard more and more victims speak, watched those videotapes, the conclusion became inescapable: This war was screamingly, shriekingly necessary."
Posted by: stevan apter at March 27, 2004 08:23 PM
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