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Anomaly UK blog posts

Suicide Bombs

The police are now saying they think the bombers were killed at each of the four sites. I see that as encouraging news, because, most simply, they won’t do it again. I do believe that terrorists ready to blow themselves up and able to merge into British society are very rare. Suicide bombing can be a regular tactic in Israel or Iraq, but not in Luton or Leeds.

Also, suicide bombers can be identified from their bodies, and the operation traced back from them, as seems to be happening currently. If the bombers are long gone, police have a more difficult job.

The police have moved quite quickly – it emerged in September 2001 that some of the US hijackers were already under investigation, but nothing concrete had come up, so they were being left alone. As soon as they struck, the authorities were able to quickly track down their backgrounds. The same may well be the true here, and no blame would neccessarily attach to the police or security services – It could be very difficult to make the jump from vague suspicion to grounds for arrest.

Why suicide bombing? Maybe they are too unsophisticated to produce timer devices of the neccessary reliability (not trivial – the “1996” bus picture in my post below was caused by an unintentional IRA suicide bomber). Maybe it is too difficult to leave a bag on a London train or bus — we really are attentive to them after all these years. Maybe they feel that, other things being equal, it is better to die in the attack than survive it. I don’t 100% believe the “Blood Feud” theory of Islamist terrorism — I do think there is some strategy to it — but it is valid to say that the bombers are very much concerned with themselves and their supporters, not just with their effects on us.

I’ll liveblog the Met. press conference here if there’s anything interesting. I’m not going anywhere – they (the Police, that is) have blown up another car in Luton station car park.

(times in GMT for reasons of insanity)

16:10 GMT – Peter Clark: They thought they knew who the bombers were before identifying their bodies.

16:11 GMT – Peter Clark: One of the suspected bombers was reported missing by his family around 10am Thursday.

Little Europe

“I only know that the British did not want the summit to be a success,” Michel says: “[The British] have a different kind of roadmap. They want Europe to be a purely economic space. If we follow them we risk turning the EU into a miniature copy of the United States. If we restrict the EU to a free market association without common rules, without this constitution, without shared political values, then Europe will no longer be able to make the citizens dream.”

Various people – Stephen Pollard, Paul Belien, The England Project, have had a go at this. But to my mind they miss the most revealing aspect.

Louis Michel alleges that Britain would turn the EU into a miniature copy of the United States. Miniature? The EU has getting on for twice the population of the United States. Yet its apologist is still under the impression that the US is larger. American power and wealth, for him, are just facts of nature or geography.

It’s not true. The USA is not bigger than the EU, except in having 5 million square kilometres of empty desert and ice sheet. It just has better economic policies. Its relative power and wealth are not facts of nature. They are the result of the policies Michel is defending. If the EU became like the USA, far from being a “miniature copy”, the result would be a richer world, by (off the top of my head) a factor of getting on for 2.

Of course, Michel is correct that the purpose of the EU is to prevent this, which is why I advocate disbanding it rather than pursuing the “British” vision Michel fears.

Moral Agents

Tim Worstall publishes a quick email from a correspondent:

Let us assume that when people such as George Galloway say that Tony Blair is responsible for the London bombings they are correct. This must mean that the bombers were not moral agents for their actions, but simply acting in response to British and American policy. But then, let’s turn that around. For that surely means that, following 9/11, George Bush was not responsible for his actions but was simply reacting in a natural way to the attacks on America. As the scholastics said, reductio ad absurdum.

Fair point as far as it goes, but I consider it worthwhile to ask to what extent it is useful to evaluate the morality of people in other cultures. Within a culture, or perhaps more relevantly a society, there can be a common morality to which it is always useful to hold everyone — morality needs to be reliably applied, and disregarding it in some cases will weaken the society.

It is not normally practical to judge the morality of actions outside your own society, except where they are extraordinarily visible, or impinge on you. But that very selectivity takes away the main reason for applying morality, rather than expediency, as a judge of actions.

The conclusion I come to is that there are concentric spheres of morality — I hold my friends and associates to a very intrusive and detailed (“high”) standard of morality, my countrymen to a slightly lower one, foreigners inside our broader international culture, lower still, and so on.

To me, by the time you get to the alien societies that these terrorists come from (or choose to identify with), morality has become totally irrelevant. It’s not that I consider murders committed by them not to be immoral, it’s that I don’t care whether they’re moral or not — I want to stop them anyway. The level of morality, as far as I can see, that is shared across the whole world, and can be applied across the whole world, is zero. People that remote from my society, I can only influence with cruder tools than by making and setting examples — bribery and deterrence pretty much cover it.

So, from the Arab point of view, Blair in invading Iraq may have just been responding to “root causes” among their own society’s actions, but, as he is part of our society, it is necessary for us to hold his policy to moral scrutiny. And for the terrorists, vice versa.

Therefore, I don’t have a problem with Galloway et al concentrating their moral judgements (whether or not I share them) on Blair. I would be happier if they would echo my sentiments that what matters regarding very foreign cultures is to what actions we manipulate them, rather than how moral they are.

Revealingly, in our society, as well as the error of treating foreigners as moral agents, we also frequently see the error of treating our countrymen as things to manipulate. While I am satisfied at least with the form of the argument “We should not invade Iraq because that will cause Arabs to bomb us”, I reject utterly any argument of the form “We should not allow drinking after 11pm because there will be more crime”. If our countrymen commit vandalism after drinking until 3am, they should be held responsible under our shared moral code, not clumsily appeased or deterred as if they were foreign potential terrorists.

There may one day be a time when Socrates would have been correct — where people everywhere share a moral code, and we should consider an offence in Kirkuk in the same category as one in Kirkcaldy. But that is not yet.

Let's not be morbid

The first hints of Diana-ism are creeping into public view. First, we have the idea of a march in London to say … what? That we’re opposed to being bombed? That we’re not afraid? That we support some specific foreign policy? I don’t think it’s really clear. The most important thing to say is that we’re not afraid, but I think any such demonstration, whatever the actual intention is more likely to suggest to the less-than-stellar intellects attacking us that they are having an effect, and that they are capable of influencing us.

The same, I’m afraid, goes for the idea of a memorial to the victims. Certainly we will have a memorial service, and I should think a discreet plaque or something, as exists for the victims of the Kings Cross fire, but a “National Memorial” to the victims, as suggested by Tessa Jowell, is counter-productive. A permanent reminder for us of the victims is also a permanent reminder for our enemies of their success — a trivial and negligible success which deserves to be forgotten. When the enemy is defeated, then it will be time to build war memorials. Until then, whether it is a year away or a century away, the way to show defiance is to carry on as normal, not to exaggerate our losses.

None of this goes for those elsewhere who choose to show solidarity with us, and involvement with us rather than non-involvement. The people at We’re Not Afraid, for example, have my gratitude, as for them there is the choice of saying “nothing to do with me, mate”. But for those of us that live or work in London, any overreaction is a sign of weakness.

Thoughts on British Muslims

A couple of points:

Firstly that the very definite statements made by Muslim leaders in Britain are significant:

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, said he utterly condemned the attacks. He was joined in his condemnation by church leaders who have been preparing a joint position between both faiths in the event of such an attack. “We are simply appalled and want to express our deepest condolences to the families,” said Sir Iqbal. “These terrorists, these evil people, want to demoralise us as a nation and divide us. All of us must unite in helping the police to hunt these murderers down.”

The gap between “We condemn these murders” and “We must help the police” might seem small logically, but it is enormous emotionally. It is a step, for instance, which some church leaders in Northern Ireland were unwilling to make until the 1990s. As I argue in my piece on the structure of terrorist movements it is the crucial step which makes a long-term domestic terrorist campaign unfeasible. If the large majority of British Muslims are prepared to help the police, then any terrorist infrastructure will have to be based overseas.

My second point, which I have not seen mentioned elsewhere, is the odd location of one of the bombs. Edgware Road is very much an Arab area of London. Note the Arab population in Britain is very small, British Muslims being overwhelmingly from the Indian sub-continent, but what there is of it is very concentrated in a small part of London. When I lived on the edge of Kilburn, I tended to feel quite safe from the IRA, and the fact of a presumably Islamist bomb going off at Edgware Road Station is remarkable.

Of course, it may just have been chosen as a point on a main commuter route – from the West London junctions of Paddington and Baker street stations to King’s Cross and Central London, just as Aldgate is on the route in from the East London junction at Liverpool Street, or it may have gone off in the wrong place, but I do find it curious.

The other reason we know we can take this

1996
18 Feb 1996

2005
7 July 2005

I’d actually forgotten what 1996 was like, although I was living in London at the time. I remember the “Ring of Steel” and the Baltic Exchange in the early 90s, but the revived campaign in the mid-90s made virtually no impact on the national mood.

Update: another point from the Guardian, via Slugger O’Toole: There were 36 bombs in London in 1973 (a bit before my time).

Early Reflections

I’m sitting at home today – it’s very impressive that they’ve got the trains running as well as they have, but my journey is a 3-hour round trip at the best of times, and it’s really not worth dealing with the extra delays.

My main reaction today, as I hinted yesterday, is that this was a weak blow. We assumed it was coming, and I expected it to be much worse. The final scale of the event was similar to the Kings Cross fire of ’86, or the Ladbroke Grove crash. The level of disruption is much lower than the Hatfield crash.

More on the implications of this below.

The second reaction is how well the authorities and the transport companies dealt with it. A major city is like a huge old engine, with massive and dangerous forces (the movements and supplies of millions of people) barely controlled. Throw a spanner into it and the secondary effects can be much worse than the impact. The engine took this almost in its stride – pretty much all of us got home last night, there was no chaos, the essential services were available to the victims and to the rest of us. There has been a lot of planning an rehearsals for this kind of situation, but that’s no guarantee the response will come off right. It did, and thanks and congratulations are due to everyone involved.

The third response is amazement at the claim by the group that said it did it, of “fear, terror and panic” around Britain. Get a clue!

I suppose every nation has a central “modern myth” of how it sees itself at its best. We’ve just been celebrating Nelson and Trafalgar and all that, but there can be no doubt that the defining myth of modern Britan is the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. The story of that myth is that an apparently invincible enemy went all out to destroy us, failed, and allowed itself to be worn out in the process, picked to pieces by a few of our best.

That’s one reason why our response is neither the “fear and panic” imagined by our enemies, or the vengeful rage of the Americans with their myths of rattlesnakes and so on. That we could allow ourselves to lose our cool, in the sight of our parents and grandparents who lived through the 1940s, would be the most shameful thing I can think of, even if the situation today were a hundred times worse than it is. We will stand and take it, as they did, and we will grind out a victory, as they did.

That is the emotional response. The history, as always, is more complicated, but I am talking mythology not history, and the mythical ideal in front of us is clear.

So what to make of the feebleness of the long-anticipated blow? While not wanting to praise a bunch of murderers too highly, the attacks on New York in 2001 showed imagination, sophistication, skill and patience. By Madrid in 2004, the imagination had gone, the scale of planning was reduced, but it was still a very competently executed and effective attack. Here in 2005, the level of compentence was way down. How can you set off four bombs in the London rush-hour and only kill 40 people? There’s either a severe shortage of backup (supplies, explosives, whatever), or a severe shortage of brains, or both.

Indeed, the most striking fact of the last five years is that there has been no follow-up attack on the United States. As the months went by we believed they were preparing for another major spectacular, and then as the years went by and attacks came elsewhere – Bali, Madrid, it sunk in that they just weren’t capable of continuing their campaign.

As I suggested yesterday, I believe that leaving aside labels and slogans, the organisation behind September 2001 was essentially destroyed in Afghanistan. There are volunteers and sympathisers aplenty, there is money and possibly brains available, but there’s no core of skilled organisers with the right contacts to put it all together in secret.

Another possibility is that September 2001 was a one-off fluke, and there never was an enemy capable of seriously threatening western society. The scale of the threat has been overestimated, either honestly or intentionally by politicians looking to further particular foreign or domestic agendas.

I don’t really buy that. The World Trade Centre was perhaps a fluke in that the towers collapsed, putting the death toll into thousands rather than hundreds, and of course they had a greater advantage of surprise then, but there was clearly a significant organisation there, with supply lines, contacts, knowledge and skills to repeat the process. It seems likely that if they had been left alone, they would have done so. To strike first at the heart of the enemy, powerfully, then less strongly in Bali, then the same in Madrid, and now less strongly still in London, really shows decline in a way that any coherent leadership would be desperate to avoid if it could.

7th July

I don’t really have time for blogging these days, but here’s a few updates:

I’m OK – The Northern line was out by the time I got to it, so I switched to the Victoria.

No idea if or how I’m getting home tonight. The underground will be out for days or weeks, I think.

I’m mainly relieved. I always knew this was coming – it’s happened and it missed me.
The choice is between a Manhattan-style major event or a Madrid-style set of co-ordinated strikes. Here in Canary Wharf would one of the top targets for the Manhattan-style attack.

So far, it seems the impact has been smaller than Madrid. Possibly there’s a trainload of bodies in a tunnel somewhere, if not then we’ve got off very light.

Still, a very heavy double blow for London these two days. This might cause even more damage to the life and economy of London than the Olympics.

Update 13:45 : Thameslink are running trains outbound from King’s Cross, so it looks like I should be able to get home (probably have to walk across London). Wikipedia has rumours of something up at Luton, but no confirmation anywhere, so I think we can ignore that. A commenter on europhobia had a story about Marines shooting a suicide bomber at Canary Wharf, which I think is rubbish. As of 12:32, company security was reporting “no specific threats have been made in relation to Canary Wharf”.

No more attacks as yet. This seems to be more on the scale (though not in the style) of the IRA than the sort of attack I was afraid of. If this is their best shot, we can definitely take it.

Update 16:00 : Getting ready to call it a day. DLR is resuming service, which will get me half way to King’s Cross. They’re saying the Underground will resume tomorrow morning, so I might even be able to come in tomorrow.

Transport and Emergency services appear to have done a superb job. If the network is running anywhere near normal tomorrow that will be an amazing feat.

There is of course the possiblity of follow-up attacks, but frankly I don’t think the bad guys are up to it. I looks to me like the brains in that outfit have all been rounded up or blown up, and we’re dealing with wannabees and idiots. Still dangerous, of course, in an unsubtle way — almost any idiot can blow up 20 people on a packed tube train — but not capable of anything really spectacular.

Kennedy Lied!

According to the BBC, Charles Kennedy said:

The Tories were relegated to south east England, while the Lib Dems were a national party of the future.

The figures say that the Tories outpolled the Lib Dems in every region of Great Britain except Scotland and Northeast England. How can this possibly make them less of a “national party” than the Lib Dems?