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One Terror Replaces Another in Britain After IRA Step, a More Determined Foe

Posted on: Monday, 1 August 2005, 12:00 CDT

There was a moment of cruel poignancy last week when Britain bade a long-hoped-for farewell to IRA terrorism only to acknowledge that it may now face a still more determined enemy in suicidal Islamic terrorism. Both the hopeful note and the warning involved men named Blair.

Within hours of each other, Prime Minister Tony Blair hailed as "a step of unparalleled magnitude" the Irish Republican Army's announcement that its "armed campaign" was over and Ian Blair, the head of Scotland Yard, warned that the bombers who struck at London's transport network on July 7 and 21 would try to attack again. "This is not the B team," he said.

That sporting reference cloaked something much deeper: an evolution in the nature of terrorism that has detached acts of violence from the kind of political aims that Western governments find debatable or negotiable.

"It was as if one flag was lowered while another was raised," the columnist Jonathan Freedland said in The Guardian.

In its broadest definition during most of the 36 years of the IRA's war, armed struggle was depicted as a means to national self- determination sanctified during the second half of the 20th century by anticolonial struggles. Liberation movements, from the African National Congress in South Africa to the Palestine Liberation Organization, claimed international legitimacy as the custodians of national aspirations.

And it followed from their focus on a national destiny that their threat was contained within one region: The IRA never claimed to be the voice of international Catholicism in a campaign to restore the medieval papacy and the Inquisition.

Its armed wing and its political wing, moreover, worked in tandem, offering an identifiable interlocutor in harness with the threat of violence. This was true, too, of the South African and Palestinian groups.

No such path to bargaining seems available from the bloodstained debris of an Underground train in London whose bomber died with his explosives.

Leaders once dubbed terrorists from Nelson Mandela to Yasser Arafat became national and internationally accepted figures. To the dismay of many, Gerry Adams, whose denials of membership in the IRA have often been met with skepticism, has nevertheless been accepted on the international stage as a statesman.

Could that ever happen with Osama bin Laden?

The answer is the clearest and loudest "no" that the West can muster. Al Qaeda stands "against everything we stand for," said David Davies, a leader of the Conservative opposition in Britain, adding, "You cannot negotiate away the values of an entire civilization."

While old liberation movements used terrorist tactics in pursuit of creating nation-states, the newest aim is apparently quite the opposite: dismantling nation-states as Western governments understand them and replacing them with the revival of a supranational Islamic caliphate.

If there is an anger among many British Muslims, whose extremists provided the crucible of the London bombers, it relates directly to Britain's involvement as an ally of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. Short of defusing that anger, Blair cannot hope to undermine the enemy within the anonymous bombers from Leeds or North London, no different superficially from a million law-abiding Muslims, yet lethally driven.

But, in the face of suicidal terrorism, Blair like President George W. Bush is not prepared even to hint that the bombers' political stances, unstated and deliberately opaque, may have any hint of legitimacy. The last thing any Western government wants is to permit jihadists to be seen by however small a minority as the voice of Islam in the way the IRA or the PLO assumed the mantle of national spokesman and liberator.

But whatever the philosophical distinctions between terrorist and freedom fighter, guerrilla and holy warrior, the evolution of suicidal attacks has changed the tactical considerations in fighting terrorism. There is no longer even a theoretical separation between "legitimate targets" of traditional insurgency like the armed forces or political leaders and the "collateral damage" of civilians, who invariably account for the most casualties. That distinction, in any event, was no more than a crumbling fig leaf for those who lost wives, husbands, brothers and sisters in Ulster.

The newest killing draws no such distinction. The victims in London on July 7 died irrespective of faith or race. No one took responsibility or registered a demand. The sense of some proportion between the bombers' actions and their intentions seems to have been lost. Only by the inner logic of what Blair has called an "evil ideology" the notion that Western intrusion into the Muslim world can be reversed only by a merciless onslaught can the most recent events in London be explained.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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