« On Writing (Badly) | Main | Afterword on The War on Terror »

July 15, 2005

Running on the Spot: The London Bombs & the War on Terror

Thursday, 7 July 2005—Terror strikes London
5.50 pm WST—It’s night here, on the other side of the globe, and cold and dark but for the news flashes of my cable news services—CNN, BBC, Sky London and Fox report with a frenzied vagueness—the services are reliant upon dazed eye-witness accounts, starved of information from authorities who clearly know better than to inflame panic. What is consistent though are words like “war” and “fatalities” and it’s clear that the second largest underground system in the world (it accommodates three million Londoners per day) is suspended. The symbolism of this attack, if not the fatalities, is staggering.
8.30 pm WST—Blair is approaching the lectern now, and he is clearly shaken. He speaks volubly, considering—determined, consoling, but eschewing the typical over-blown rhetoric which over-shadows real human drama and common sense. He is a man knifed in the stomach, but his presence is impressive, largely because it is so real. I wonder if I have to like him a little bit now…
9.00—Bush makes his eulogy, deputizing the cowboy-color we’ve come to expect. There is very little human about it. We have heard this all before…
11.00—Many hours have passed since the explosions, and various heads of various authorities now summon a press conference. The picture is roughly painted for us: Four, not seven explosions. Three on trains, the other on a double-decker bus. All the bombs were detonated in the heart of London. 33 people have died, the figure expected to rise by 20 or more. The head of the Underground says he hopes the tube will be reopened some time tomorrow…
In Iraq, during the same passage of time, there would likely have been 12 bombing fatalities (largely locals) and roughly 8 kidnappings.

One Week Later
There’s a rub here, and it’s this—no-one can be protected from this kind of attack, not now, not ever. Bush, Blair, Howard, Scotland Yard, they all emphasize the importance of national security, but it’s futile. There is no such thing as an impregnable homeland security, not for this asymmetrical business. No Star Wars system would have prevented American jets being flown into American buildings, and no police presence could have prevented four Islamo-fascists carrying death onto the London tube. Our leaders have an increasingly tough sell on this point, for they themselves must realise the futility, and so we have a war on terror, a bogus idea that may assuage the dim-witted, but it won’t save lives.
We were sold the invasion of Iraq, in part, as a strike against a cultivator of terror. Well, two and half years later it hasn’t seemed to have worked, and stories like Abu Ghraib can only work as recruitment posters for prospective terrorists. In Afghanistan, well… the Taliban were smashed, but only in the sense that they were deposed from a central command. They fled to the mountains, taking their fighting expertise with them (this is the country, remember, that staved off a relentless Soviet attack during the ‘80s), and are now, apparently, exerting influence from there—a fact supported by Howard’s re-deployment of troops in that region.
So where are we? Homeland security is futile, and our military excursions (a vast, messy extension of protecting Western borders) hasn’t proved profitable. Rather it seems to have been an expensive, bloody, intractable mess.
So why do we continue to support the premise of the war on terror (i.e. that ideas may be combated by military extension)? Largely because our leaders continue to tell us that this is a war against our “ideals”, against “our way of life” i.e. as distinct from a war against our politics. This is a crucial difference—it creates a discourse in which we resort to embedded notions of cultural ideals, cultural identification, stymieing discussion concerning our politics—i.e. the real versus the abstract.
Breeding nationalism is very important for keeping up our faith in this war on terror. Bush has used the tactic relentlessly since S-11, and now the political expediency of jingoism is apparent to Blair, who’s summoning the Churchillian stoicism, the Blitz-surviving strength, so integral to the British ideal. This may be something close to Freud’s “narcissistic ideal”—what Britain strives for as its ideal has already occurred (during the Blitz), thus creating a narcissistic satisfaction. All Britons, poor or rich, can identify with this, and so it becomes a substitutive satisfaction for the sacrifices of this war (e.g. dead troops, pissed Jihadists, restrictions on personal freedoms). Being told that this is a war against the British-bulldog, or against the Aussie-digger, is easily translatable, and encourages us to participate with the cultural ideal. Of course this leads to hyper-patriotism, and is clearly hostile to any deeper discourse concerning our relationship with the East.
So what happens now? The West is encouraged to retreat into cultural ideals, breeding a pig-headedness that will surely rub against the Islamo-fascists who continue to operate underground. We are at a stale-mate which has very, very little hope of being unlocked any time soon.

One Day Later
Ahh, queer ramblings for a queer time. The above requires some Heavy Editing, but who will do that? The above themes don’t bear looking at for extended periods—it’s much too thick and the stench of failure is everywhere.
We’re locked in now, for the long haul, and so you had better start practicing your responses to your future child’s question: “Did everybody used to have to wear these masks, Daddy?”

Posted by Marty at July 15, 2005 10:51 AM

Comments

Posted by: alexander at July 19, 2005 5:53 PM

Posted by: marty at July 19, 2005 6:04 PM