This morning, London was hit with at least four explosions, three at critical stations along the Tube. There have been at least two thirty-three forty-one thirty-seven fatalities and more than 150 1,000 seven hundred badly-wounded people.
The whole London Underground, and apparently the whole bus system as well, has been shut down. How people will get home from work in about four or five hours is completely beyond me.
It certainly makes my morning of reviewing another set of disappointing depositions, heavy rain, and a broken elevator seem trivial by comparison. No one’s blown up my subway this morning. However, it does make me think about what’s going on up in Anderson County, and the security breaches that have recently come to light out there. Working on the cases that I have been, I have so far seen little cause to be confident that the people who are actually supposed to be protecting a rather sensitive national security asset are doing a good job.
While the official word as of nine this morning (Eastern time, 1:00 p.m. in London itself) is that the responsible parties have not been identified, it’s obviously a foregone conclusion that ultimate responsibility will be tracked back to the same sons of bitches who attacked New York, Washington, and Madrid. That ordinary people have learned the signature marks of an attack like this — one timed to kill the maximum number of civilians, aimed at a financial center with symbolic value, and with the mechanism of near-simultaneous explosions at multiple locations — is horrifying.
I’ve optimistically compared the campaign against terrorism to historical campaigns to eradicate slavery and piracy. But when the slave traders and the pirates fought back, more innocent people whose only goal was going to work in the morning didn’t die. It makes me wonder if these kinds of attacks will sap our political will to fight or enervate a marginal desire to make the world safer for civilization. 9/11 had the latter effect on the U.S. (and the world) but Madrid had the effect of swaying the Spanish elections to the anti-war party and the withdrawal of our Spanish allies from Iraq.
The impulse to vengeance feels overwhelming, as it did after Madrid and especially as it did after 9/11.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — if you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. Our leaders, for better or for worse, have moved us down a path of using our national security assets, most prominently including the military, to eradicate terrorism. This cannot be accomplished by half measures or by giving up before the task is complete. It also will make things worse than they were before. This morning’s attacks in London are grim proof of that. So though I fear where it will take us and the price we will pay to get there — both in terms of loss of life and in loss of liberty — there is no other reasonable choice but to continue prosecuting this “War on Terror.” And we add another city to the list of homes of those victims and their families, for whom we will seek redemption and the promise that those they love have not shed their blood in vain.
