Horrific, cowardly, those are words that first spring to mind. It caught us by surprise even though in the back of our minds I suspect we all knew that a major incident on the UK mainland was unavoidable.
Tony Blair has made his speech to the nation in response to the attacks from the G8 summit. While I appreciate that at times like these the national leaders need to speak clearly and firmly, I wonder where this rhetoric will lead us:
It is important that those engaged in terrorism realise that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world. … Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilised nations throughout the world.
As an immediate reaction to these horrific events this response is fine, but as a policy statement it would be wholly inadequate. Of course we are determined to, and should, defend our values against this kind of atrocity, and we expect our leaders to take firm and uncompromising steps (and if that requires radical measures, then let it be). However, the issue of terrorism will not go away as long as we think that the ultimate aim of terrorism is to destroy our way of life; terrorism is not an end in itself but rather a means to an end, and if we are to have any hope of getting rid of it, we have to ask why.
Why is it that certain people are prepared to inflict such suffering on others, and die in the process? Why is it that these people hate us? There are underlying reasons why, and without reflecting on these reasons, and responding to them in an appropriate way, we can never win the ‘war on terror’.
It was one of the remarkable features of the western response to the 9/11 incidents that this question did not seem to be asked by those who are responsible for waging this ‘war on terror’ on our behalf. Instead we responded by pretty indiscriminate retaliation against Afghanistan and Iraq, which only fanned the flames of extremism, giving it a justification for further acts of terror (should it need such justification — is there really any moral difference between blowing up a bus of innocent people with a backpack of explosives and the dropping of a laser-guided bomb into a civilian neighbourhood? I, for one, am horrified by both).
In the UK we often speak of not dealing just with crime but also with the causes of crime; perhaps it is time that our leaders take the same approach to the problem of terrorism.
