ENGLAND — It was classic British understatement: “We advise you
not to travel by train into central London.” That’s how my
overnight transatlantic flight was greeted at the gate at Heathrow
on Thursday, 10 minutes after the first terrorist bomb. Once we
were finally allowed into the arrivals area at Terminal 3, the
other shoe immediately dropped. The terminal was drowning in
snippets of information, rumor, fear, and bewilderment. News
quickly spread about more bombs having gone off. No one knew how
many bombs, where, or how many casualties.
As I reached my car, BBC radio was reporting the complete
shutdown of all public transit in and out of London: trains, buses,
and the Underground; the famous tube. Within a few hours,
Heathrow’s Terminal 3 was evacuated. Luckily, my journey took me
around, rather than through, London, so I arrived at my conference
in the idyllic Sussex countryside having avoided much of the
transportation nightmare that would dominate the rest of the
average Londoner’s day.
I was the first conference participant to arrive. In a scene
reminiscent of the one that played out throughout America in the
hours immediately after the attacks of September 11, I found the
entire staff glued to a TV set, everyone trying to comprehend the
developing horror and ensuing chaos.
It was highly personal stuff. You’d be hard pressed to find a
Briton who doesn’t have family or friends living or working in
London. As in America on 9/11, personal communication was close to
nonexistent. Even outside London, phone lines were down and cell
phones didn’t work. No one who spent several hours on 9/11
literally out of touch with loved ones ever wanted to relive that
experience. On Thursday, I got the chance.
Each morning around 9 o’clock my sister transfers onto the same
train from Kings Cross station — the very first train to be
bombed. Finally, someone’s cell phone was working and, with a
borrowed phone, I spent several anxious hours trying to reach her.
The official government statements weren’t reassuring. Authorities
kept telling viewers that only two people had died, but the
television screens clearly put the lie to that estimate.
Finally, my sister answered the phone. She’d been running a few
minutes late that morning and had just missed her train. Thank God.
In the company of many thousands of dazed and frightened fellow
commuters, my sister spent several hours in a futile attempt to
make her way home.
She walked through a city that wasn’t empty but was eerily
quiet. Despite their experience with Irish terrorism, Londoners
were stunned. The IRA would, on occasion, give a warning and
generally favored hard targets such as politicians and the security
services. This was an attack on soft targets, without warning. It
will take some time for the largest attack on British soil since
the end of World War II to really sink in.
A day later, everything is different. I may be situated in an
isolated country house, but bomb-sniffing police dogs are
patrolling the conference grounds. London itself is largely back to
work but far from back to normal. Just as Washington and New York
haven’t quite felt the same post-9/11, so too London, post-7/7. You
can see it on the faces.
What Britons can’t see is the enemy. From the late '60s to the
late '90s, every young Irishman was suspect. Today, the enemy
doesn’t speak with an Irish accent; today, he may carry a Koran.
Britain’s intelligence services know of at least 200 British-born
Muslims who’ve traveled to Afghanistan for terrorist training
before returning home to Britain. The authorities concede that the
true number may be closer to a few thousand.
How will newly multicultural Britain deal with what may prove to
be a homegrown problem? The small slice of second-generation
British Muslim society that is far more radical than the previous
generation poses a very difficult dilemma for Tony Blair, whose
instincts regarding cultural and religious tolerance mirror those
of President Bush. If current suspicions are confirmed — that is,
Thursday’s terror was al Qaeda’s handiwork and there was domestic
participation — I fear that the voice of the nationalist far right
will receive a most unwelcome infusion of political oxygen.
Blair is fortunate that the attacks occurred soon after, instead
of before, this year’s election. Although the majority of voters
wouldn’t have changed allegiances in defiance of the terrorists,
additional slippage away from Labour to the anti-war Liberal
Democrats would have made Blair’s electoral position far more
tenuous than it is today.
Within a day, the G8 summit was back on its unfortunate track.
The G8 agreed to make a bad policy worse by doubling the money sent
to corrupt African governments. The conventional wisdom is that
terrorism in both Africa and the Middle East reflects, in part, a
lack of economic development.
Western leaders clearly remain ignorant of the fact that the
undeveloped world’s hopes rest with an injection of full-blooded
capitalism rather than another dose of the same old socialist
medicine. Their inability to learn obvious lessons doesn’t bode
well for the continued prosecution of their war on terror —
wherever that terror is felt.
