London
I deal with news on this blog, but generally not the fast-breaking kind (unless I find it somewhere else first), so I've not got much to pass along about today's bombings in London. Any facts I could contribute would be quickly superseded, and I'm sure we can do without my joining the chorus of those noting the tragedy and senselessness of it all. I'll just supply some links to special coverage from BBC News, where you can also find a frequently updated reporters' log and eyewitness accounts. (Since this is such a fast-moving story, I don't know how long these links will remain good before they're outmoded. If any of the links don't work, here's the BBC News homepage, from where you can find updated information.)
For the time being, any other subjects seem somehow trivial, so I'm disinclined to write about them, but you never know how long "the time being" will last. I'll be back tomorrow, if not before.
posted by Doug @ 2:36 PM
11 comments
11 Comments:
I don't know. Not to be blithe, but if this is all old AQ has got, they're no more potent than the IRA or the Weather Underground. I don't mean to dismiss the tragedy of 40 or so dead. That is terrible and senseless. But really, it's not even a bad plane crash. And for this we're engaged in a treasury draining world war?
That's a good point. In many ways, terrorism works like a horror movie. As long as we don't actually see the shark, our imaginations will more than compensate for what it might be capable of. Terrorists are the same. As long as we're scared of them, we give them far more power than they'd otherwise have. From what little I've seen of the Brit response to today's attack, we could learn a lot from them. There seemed to be remarkably little panic at the scene, and to a person, all the people I've heard interviewed had every intention of getting on with their lives and not letting this undermine them.
9/11 looks now to have been some kind of over the top freak success. The natural fear was that the next event would be nuclear (which of course it still might be). But the bombings in Madrid and London do make that look less likely -- they look less like the work of some all powerful mastermind and his army and more like the work of a handful of boys seeking identity through attention.
Remember when the phrase "the war on terror" seemed cartoonish? It was right around the time Iraq seemed like a backwater afterthought. What would history have looked like had the US been able to adopt a “blitz spirit,” to clean up and get back to work, rather than overreact and start a cowboy crusade?
My reading has been too scattered lately, so off the top of my head, I can't remember where I saw this, but somebody made the point in the last week that, despite whatever numbers al Queda may actually have, they have trouble finding quality operatives. Many of the recruits are strong on ideology but weak on other skills. Wherever I read this (I'll see if I can find a reference tomorrow when I'm not gazing longingly toward my bed) suggested that the organization was really stretching to come up with four people capable of learning to fly. Maybe the less ambitious Madrid and London bombings are closer to their natural operating ability.
And as for achieving a calmer, more collected response to 9/11, I guess it's always good to have a dream, but Rove's recent comments about liberals offering therapy to the terrorists close the door on any kind of rational response from this administration. (Who will be the first right-winger to label the Brits soldiering on in the face of attacks wimps for not upping their numbers in Iraq?)
I don't know. I've been thinking about that Rove comment myself for the last 24 hours, along with a number of comments from Bush and others, specifically Bush's comments regarding the Danish PM(?), where Bush identified the PM as one of the ones who "got it," who saw the world had changed on 9/11 and responded correctly.
Perhaps it is wishful thinking, but I sense a bit of defensiveness and shoring up here, as if the scales are falling and people are waking up to the fact that al Qaida may not be the Worldwide Communist Conspiricy, itself a wild exaggeration.
One reason the British were rational and well prepared is precisely because they're used to terrorist bombings. Unfortunatley, we seem willing to court further such catastrophes, so maybe we'll get used to it too!
Well, I hope it doesn’t take too many (or frankly, any!) more US bombings to get used to terrorism, but get used to it I hope we do. Capitalism breeds inequity. Media breeds paranoia. Some mole will always pop up as another is whacked down. As “weak and womanly” as the right want to make seeing the hunt for terrorists not as a war but as a police action, that reaction is the logical response, far more rational than the insane, and ultimately quixotic, crusade to change the Arab world through enforced corporate capitalism that Bush and his comb-over neocons still promote.
After hearing his speech and run yesterday, I think I finally get Tony Blair’s connection to Bush, they’re both inveterate narcissists! Blair seemed to imply that the bombs were personal, that they had destroyed all HIS HARD WORK – HIS work on global warming, HIS hosting of the G-8 summit, HIS work to bring the Olympics to London. Him, him, him.
My previous reference to the questionable abilities of al Queda's operatives came from Kevin Drum's mini-review of Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott. He suggests that car bombs are stretching their technical know-how.
I suspect you're right, Ron, about Blair and Bush's attraction to each other, but why would narcissists attract other narcissists? That just makes them have to compete more for the spotlight.
Hmm, you're right, maybe narcissist is the wrong word. Could be that Tony and George are attracted to each other because, in their universe, they are the only two people they can see.
Narcissist is a good word, and I think it describes both of them, but I just wondered if they'd find that quality attractive in each other.
I've got a different question. How far off the mark is Tony Blair when he believes these attacks were a personal slight? The argument can certainly be made that it's his (along with W's) policies in the Middle East that were targeted. But if we're talking personal statements, I much prefer Ken Livingstone's, which I'm going to post about soon.
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