7/7 the disturbing legacy

Just over two weeks on from the bombings and the legacy is somewhat more disturbing than could have been anticipated / hoped for. In the immediate aftermath, there were a number of theories people were talking & thinking about; Were they manually/remotely detonated as in Madrid ?
Were there timing devices, as favoured by the IRA ? Or were they the work of suicide bombers ?
With each scenario there were both disturbing & partially reassuring consequences – ie, would the bombers still be alive to strike again? would greater vigilance for unattended bags stop future attacks?

Early this week, it became clear we’d suffered under the latter, & arguably worst, scenario. When first hearing it was the work of suicide bombers, all of whom died in the attacks, the first reaction is thank god they’re all dead & can’t do it again. But that thought is quickly replaced by a more disturbing realization – no level of vigilance targetted at identifying unattended baggage will spot a suicide bomber with explosive in his backpack. With their aim being maximum casualties, no place where there is a large concentration of people can ever be made safe. If you have compulsory baggage checks on entering the tube, at the busiest stations you’ll end up with huge queues/density of people waiting to be checked – an equally attractive target for the bombers. Imagining somehow the tube where made secure enough to cease to be an attractive target, then attention would surely switch to bars, clubs, cinemas, theatres. There’s no way to secure an entire city against a determined suicide bomber, as one can see only too plainly from examining the huge level of security in Israel, and still all too frequent bombings. And finally, the worst aspect of all, they’d managed to brainwash well educated, middle class people born & raised in Britain. If that proved possible once, it could surely be done again.

So, given that traditional anti-terror precautions used in Britain are useless against suicide bombers, how could we prevent such attacks in the future ? Given, that even the highly experianced Israeli security forces are unable to completely prevent these kind of attacks, the ultimate answer surely has to involve working to resolve the social & political circumstances that motivate people to carry out attacks. Unfortunately, they are not easily resolved issues, many of the problems having been initiated long ago in the height of the cold war, eg, the repeated destabalization of Afghanistan by British, Russians, Taliban & Americans over more than 50 years. Others are more recent problems, such as the tremendous fuck up in securing Iraq in the aftermath of the war, primarily through deploying far too few troops to cope with situations on the ground. Resolve them we must though, for alternative future of living in a world scarred by suicide bombers is too horrific to even contemplate. Jonathan Freedland sums its up perfectly in his comments early this week.

We can congratulate ourselves on our phlegmatic cool so far. But we should start to wonder what would happen to us if these attacks became a fact of life, as they have long been in Israel (and are now in Baghdad). Would we find restraint as easy a policy to follow if there was a bomb on the tube or the bus every other day?

I hope never to know the answer to that question. I want it to stay hypothetical for ever. But a menace we have until now seen only from a distance has stepped right up to face us. The ground is still trembling beneath our feet.