LONDON -- I wish I knew the rhythms of this city well enough to measure exactly how jarred Londoners were by the news that, all over town, young men and women had been working away diligently on a diabolical plot to completely disrupt civilization, killing a few thousand people in the process. I know New Yorkers a lot better, and these Londoners remind me of New Yorkers. They may not be unfazed, but they're not slowing down to examine it too closely. Granted that they are not, for the most part, flying to New York or Washington on Los Angeles, but there is no escaping where this plot was being hatched. Still, survival requires urgency. I was in New York the night the NYPD and the FBI announced that they had foiled a plot to blow up the tunnels under the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge.
The reaction then was, “Whatever, this is New York." The claim was not so much to invincibility or indestructibility or even nonchalance, but to survival. "We could take a punch," one guy told me that night. This was, of course, before 9-11, which may only have proved his point.
And on Thursday, as the newspaper headlines blared on about the arrests and the cataclysm averted at Heathrow, the locals kept at their business. The cool, chic places on the South Bank were jammed; the pubs were crowded; the portrait artist painted tourists; a Bobby came along in Leicester Square and moved along some street musicians -- an unusual trio of bagpipe, violin and an odd-looking drum -- who were playing in the wrong place. He told them firmly where to go, and they did.
England had just beaten, crushed really, Pakistan in a series of Test cricket matches, and in the celebratory coverage was prominent mention that the triumph was accomplished largely through the outstanding performances by the sons of immigrants from Pakistan and India, including the first Sikh to play for the "national side." This is noteworthy because the story on terror here is inextricably linked to the life in these immigrant communities. The papers kept noting with unadorned irony how most of those arrested were "homegrown," born in Britain. This undermines the paradigm in which fanatical Eastern religionists, unaccustomed to and unenlightened by the glories of democracy, decide to attack the freedom-loving, democratic West. They know us. They don't love us. They want to kill us. We have to stop them.
For people who saw their underground trains and buses bombed last summer, who watched 9-11 with the rest of the world, and who, everyday, can walk past reminders of the blitz in the cracked walls of the city, to continue living is the supreme achievement. More people here ride their bikes to work after the 7-11 attacks in 2005, and people are more watchful on the tube. But, in general, the show goes on.
One man I know here worried about his wife who was in Rome and was supposed to get home the night the plot was unveiled. And early pessimism had given way to hope that she would get home, not for dinner, but on Thursday night. "Your president thanked us for foiling that plot," he said, a snide English chuckle riding shotgun on every deliberate word. The president did not say “foiling.” What he did say was: "I want to thank the government of Tony Blair and officials in the United Kingdom for their good work in busting this plot."
"Busting" is what he said.
Drunk drivers get busted; numbers runners, maybe. But when a bunch of lunatics are trying to create Roman candles out of airplanes, the president could have had more to say and could have said it better than that. "The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to -- to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation." This was his overall analysis.
There is something so rote in that response as to communicate almost nothing, and it leaves the unsettling impression that the self-anointed leader of the "war on terror" has not thought through all the issues, that his words, seemingly not well-chosen, reflect a set of circumstances not well-considered.
"The -- this country is safer than it was prior to 9-11," the president added, though that is an increasingly hard sell to anxious Americans: Hardly anyone agrees with that proposition, and Londoners, who see the war in Iraq as the catalyst for much of the terror since, have a decidedly different view. "He said nothing about the fact that he is the one who got us into this whole mess," said the man with the wife trying to get out of Rome.
It seems likely now that it would be better to walk home to Washington than to try to get through airport security in London, especially on a flight operated by one of the targeted airlines. But there is only one way to handle terror and terrorists: Stop them and survive.
No carry-ons? I could take a punch.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.
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