London bombings: initial reaction

As well as an enormous amount of straight news reporting, there's also a good deal of comment and analysis available on the attacks in London yesterday. Here's some of the news and considered reaction I've found so far.

Firstly, the headline: More than 50 people have been killed in a series of bomb blasts in central London. According to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair there were 700 casualties, of whom 350 were taken to hospital and 22 are still in a critical condition.

The incident that perhaps best illustrates the sheer depravity of the attacks was the bombing of the bus in Tavistock Square, apparently designed to hit commuters escaping from the chaos on the tube.

Of all the reaction from leaders, secular and religious, I suspect Mayor Ken Livingstone best summed up the mood of Londoners.

"This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at presidents or prime ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion or whatever.....the city of London is the greatest in the world because everybody lives side-by-side in harmony. Londoners will not be divided by the cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved and that is why I'm proud to be the Mayor of that city."

Here's a BBC summary of press reaction from the UK and Europe.

The Arab world and British Muslim leaders condemned the bombings in the strongest terms. But the fear of violent reprisals (for want of a better word) against the Islamic community in the UK is already growing.

For many westerners keen to gain some insight and understanding of the Islamic and Arab world, the website of Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, has been our first port of call on the internet every day for the past few years. His news round up of this morning includes a brief look at the differing reactions George Galloway and Jack Straw have given to the bombings, as well as giving details of the ongoing carnage in Iraq. Many Londoners who have followed the daily accounts provided by Cole and Iraqi bloggers like Riverbend of car bombings in Baghdad, Mosul and other Iraqi cities will yesterday have found themselves, briefly, living the nightmares they had hitherto only read about on their computer screens. As Cole says "The bombings in London on Thursday underlined what absolute hell Iraqis are living through, who suffer the equivalent every other day".

Also on Cole's website there's a discussion of how "Bush's incompetent crusade in Iraq has made us all less safe" and an excerpt from an interview with him about the possibility that an al-Qaeda-linked group was behind the bombings (full version here). Further down the page, Cole reproduces the grotesque statement made by the group claiming responsibility; disgusting whether or not they really are guilty of causing the attack itself.

Finally from Informed Comment, Cole's brief initial reaction to the attacks is worth reading. He relays the views of Michael Scheuer, the former CIA Bin Laden analyst, interviewed on US TV.

"Scheuer believes that al-Qaeda is an insurgent ideology focused on destroying the United States and its allies, because its members believe that the US is trying to destroy them. Al-Qaeda members see the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, backed by the US; US support for military regimes like those of Pakistan and Egypt; and US military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as evidence of a US onslaught on Islam and Muslims aimed at reducing them to neo-colonial slavery. That is, specific Western policies are the focus of al-Qaeda response, not a generalized "hatred" of "values.""

From Washington, Jim Lobe describes the "growing skepticism...about the effectiveness of US President George W Bush's "war on terror"" and looks at what the political effects of this latest atrocity might be.

At Asia Times Online, B Raman gives the intelligence background to the attacks. Raman is a former Indian government official whose articles on intelligence and terrorism are always worth reading.

Here's a free version of "The reality of this barbaric bombing", by the UK's veteran Middle East journalist Robert Fisk (the official version's in today's issue of The Independent)

Possibly the best of the considered reaction I've read so far has been this from former UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, giving his views on how western leaders ought to respond to yesterday's events. For now, I'll finish with a quote from that article, and will post more over the course of the weekend.

"In the absence of anyone else owning up to yesterday's crimes, we will be subjected to a spate of articles analysing the threat of militant Islam. Ironically they will fall in the same week that we recall the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, when the powerful nations of Europe failed to protect 8,000 Muslims from being annihilated in the worst terrorist act in Europe of the past generation.

Osama bin Laden is no more a true representative of Islam than General Mladic, who commanded the Serbian forces, could be held up as an example of Christianity. After all, it is written in the Qur'an that we were made into different peoples not that we might despise each other, but that we might understand each other.

Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden's organisation would turn its attention to the west.

The danger now is that the west's current response to the terrorist threat compounds that original error. So long as the struggle against terrorism is conceived as a war that can be won by military means, it is doomed to fail. The more the west emphasises confrontation, the more it silences moderate voices in the Muslim world who want to speak up for cooperation. Success will only come from isolating the terrorists and denying them support, funds and recruits, which means focusing more on our common ground with the Muslim world than on what divides us.

President Bush is given to justifying the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that by fighting terrorism abroad, it protects the west from having to fight terrorists at home. Whatever else can be said in defence of the war in Iraq today, it cannot be claimed that it has protected us from terrorism on our soil."