Solemn denunciation is fine, but it's time for action

"It was bound to happen sooner or later." That has been the thrust of almost every non-official comment, whether from Londoners or from outsiders, that I have heard since the London bombs went off Thursday morning.

After 30 and more years of terrorism, such barbarism has become commonplace. Since 9/11, we have been expecting the particular terrorists responsible for that atrocity to strike again somewhere in the West.

And the British authorities have repeatedly warned that Britain would be among the first targets to be attacked.

Thriller-writers and documentary film-makers have even speculated that terrorists would eventually plant bombs in the London underground where, in the darkness deep below the city, they would cause the maximum casualties and the greatest panic.

As for the familiar red London double-decker bus, that has been targeted by terrorists before. Eight years ago, I sat over dinner in the Royal Festival Hall watching buses trundle over Waterloo Bridge.

One inched out of my sight into the Aldwych and promptly exploded with a loud "whoosh". The diners all looked nervously at each other. I walked over and saw the handiwork of Irish terrorists an hour later an iron skeleton of a bus surrounded by broken glass.

On Thursday, a bus packed with passengers was destroyed even more thoroughly by a much larger bomb.

Like the bombs in the Underground, it was timed to explode when large crowds of Londoners were arriving to start work in "the City", as the financial district is known.

Current estimates are that more than 50 people were killed and several hundreds injured. But it may be some days before the full number of casualties is known the passengers in the bus were horribly reduced to body fragments.

As happened in New York following the destruction of the Twin Towers, the efforts of family members to trace their missing loved ones are heartbreaking.

Yet the panic and disorder that the terrorists expected from this mass murder their optimistic claim on an Islamist website on Thursday was that Britain was "burning with fear and terror" never materialised.

London's transport and emergency services had planned for such an emergency with great thoroughness. They held a mock emergency training session only a month ago.

And they responded to the actual emergency not only with courage and efficiency but also with swift and intelligent improvisation using nearby buses to deliver the wounded to hospital rather than waiting for ambulances, and closing down the mobile phone network that had triggered bombs last year in Madrid.

Stoicism and self-discipline

Ordinary Londoners reacted with stoicism and self-discipline, following the instructions of the emergency services, helping each other out of the wreckage, walking dutifully home through London and even cracking the kind of ironic jokes that such occasions bring forth.

Helen Szamuely, a well-known British blogger, praised the courage and competence of the authorities and then added wryly: "I have no doubt tomorrow London Transport will carry on as before with stoppages, faulty trains, non-working points and signals."

To world-weary British ears this "getting on with it" humour is greatly preferable to the solemn denunciations of the terrorists' actions as "barbaric attacks on all civilised countries" such as we heard from Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Of course, politicians, presidents and popes have to issue such denunciations. It is their stock-in-trade. And the words themselves are true enough the terrorists are indeed barbaric.

To say so is far better than to utter the adolescent sophistry that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" that usually guides Reuters and the AP.

Still, such denunciations have been issued too many times before. They have begun to sound hollow.

All too often they have been followed by shameful concessions such as Spain's withdrawal from Iraq following the Madrid bombing last year or by negotiations with the very people denounced as beyond the pale of civilisation a short time before.

On his recent visit to the United States, for instance, Britain's new Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Hain, spoke to nervous Irish-American groups on behalf of the Sinn Fein-IRA's Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, praising as "visionary" the very men who had presided over earlier terrorist bombings in London.

If the terrorists responsible for Thursday's murders read of Hain's remarks, would they not be justified in concluding that one day they too might be similarly hailed if they bomb and shoot long enough?

We can no longer afford to give any terrorists that kind of incentive.

Instead of high-sounding denunciations of "barbaric" murderers, ordinary Brits would prefer clear signs that their government is determined to defend them effectively against future attacks and to punish the perpetrators for past ones.

They want action but there are two sorts of action to choose from. Britain is still divided over the wisdom of the Iraq war and, after the present mood of anti-terrorism indignation has faded, the political debate over it will revive.

Because Blair's New Labour placemen and the main Conservative opposition party are united in their support for the Iraq intervention and the war on terrorism, the Brits will stand firm alongside America for the foreseeable future.

Solidifying British opinion

Unless there are victories in those wars, however, that support will weaken and eventually erode.

Blair should therefore take positive practical measures, preferably in cooperation with the opposition parties, to root out terrorism inside and outside Iraq and to solidify British popular opinion in support of such measures even if it means annoying his "European partners".

He has one great advantage he did not have until Thursday: the third great assault by Islamist terrorists on a great Western city produced not panic and disorder but calm on the part of ordinary Londoners, the customary courage of the emergency services and efficient management by those directing them.

The terrorists had a success, but Londoners denied them a victory. As Noel Coward wrote about an earlier bombing of the British capital: "Every Blitz your resistance stiffening/From the Ritz to the Anchor and Crown". Nothing ever can override the pride of London town.

John O'Sullivan, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and former editorial page editor of The Post, is editor-at-large of the National Review and a member of Benador Associates.