London

I've been reading the reactions to the terrorist bombings in London with interest. The general consensus is along the lines of:

"We've dealt with much worse than this. We survived the Blitz, we survived the IRA, and this isn't even in the same league."

The British are made of stern stuff, there's no doubt about that. But I am somewhat concerned. I'm going to try to put what I'm thinking into words so please forgive me in advance if this sounds somewhat convoluted.

When the US was attacked on 9/11 it finally broke us out of our complacency and we decided to do something about it once and for all. Of course this wasn't the first terror attack against Americans. Previous attacks such as the USS Cole, the barracks in Beirut, the US embassies in Africa, were all terror attacks but we treated them as isolated incidents and then went back to what we were doing. We mourned the dead, repaired the damage, and then moved on. But 9/11 was an attack on US soil, and was several orders of magnitude greater in terms of loss of life and property. We finally said, "That's it, we're going to clean house," and set about to do so. We took out the Taliban in Afghanistan and then invaded Iraq. We are fighting a war, of which both Afghanistan and Iraq are just campaigns, because we want to end the threat and ability of terrorists to carry out such acts for good.

The attacks in Madrid resulted in the people of Spain, or at least a majority of those who voted in the following election, to choose appeasement over victory. They voted in a socialist government which immediately pulled all Spanish troops out of Iraq. They basically surrendered to the terrorists saying, in effect, "Please don't hurt us anymore. We'll be good."

Now we have the attacks in London. While I don't believe Britain will follow Spain into surrender, I'm somewhat concerned about the reactions I am seeing. Although the attacks were of smaller scale than those on 9/11, they nevertheless represent the deadliest assault by Islamic terrorists on British soil so far. Yet what I'm seeing is an attitude of basically, "It's no big deal. We've had worse. We can cope." It's almost like they're being rather complacent about the whole thing. I read one comment from a survivor of the Blitz which said, "I've been blown up by a better class of bastard than you." My question is whether that means you don't think much needs to be done in response. I'm not saying that Britain should lash out blindly, nor even that they should launch independent campaigns in the war on terror. But I worry that the British won't take this attack as seriously as they should. I can only hope that this worry is unfounded.