Version 1: Indiscriminate killing

London Mayor Ken Livingstone:

This view, fortunately because it would mean hopelessness, is unsupportable. It is of course true that the means are as Livingstone describes them – it certainly doesn’t seem to have mattered which people were on the trains or buses. But confusing means and ends so that terrorism is seen only as psychopathic murder will make long-term resistance to terrorism impossible.

Version 2: The bombings as retaliation for England’s role in Iraq and Afghanistan

This is, of course, the explicit position stated in the unverified but widely publicized claim of responsibility by The Secret Organization of al-Qaeda in Europe.

As well, it is the position taken (predictably, his critics would probably like noted) and widely reported by outspoken anti-war MP George Galloway.

Late yesterday this same prospect was offered to Condoleezza Rice in an interview with the BBC’s Jonathan Beale:

This is the explanation offered by the senior diplomat of the United States for why we would be wrong to see the London bombings as retribution for English participation in American wars abroad. Based on this we are to conclude, as Rice does, that “there's no separate peace to be made with terrorists. The terrorists are after our way of life and we have to defeat them. There is no other way to deal with them than through strength.”

(I suppose it’s worth noting that the flaws of her argument don’t necessarily make the position she takes wrong. But the familiarity of the rhetoric here does kind of make one worry that this is the best they’ve got. In any event ...)

Rice’s proof that there’s no link between American military involvement in the Middle East and terrorism: “[T]hey've been doing this now for a couple of decades and for a while the world, going all the way back to Beirut and going back to the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 or the attacks on American Embassies in 1998, this has been going on for a while.”

What would Beirut have to do with fueling anti-American resentment in the Middle East?
What was Simon Reeve talking about in his book on the 1993 World Trade Center bombings when he reflected that “The US nearly paid the ultimate price for its friendship with Israel”?
Why would bin Laden choose the American embassies to bomb?

Not very convincing examples in that they'd work as well or better as examples of why political action does in fact draw the attention of terrorists.

Even in the event of no attacks, the claim of “no separate peace” can never be actively disproven inasmuch as an attack could happen at any time. So, noting that Canada, Germany and France have not faced the kinds of attacks that have been faced by England and Spain isn’t exactly proof of anything.

But, to pronounce confidently that there is no relationship between approaches to terrorism and the likelihood of terrorist attack can’t be proven either. And a surface look at least would suggest that there is not even countervailing circumstantial evidence that would make one prefer that position.

Version 3

The greater participation of Western nations in a military-backed political restructuring of the Middle East might make a US/Iraq-style strategy more plausible both politically (creating a broad international front against political opposition to such occupations) and militarily (providing more troops to make those occupations run more smoothly). The catch is that participation does make each participating country more likely to be the victim of terrorism as retaliation.

In other words, if the US were going it alone there might well be more terrorism in the world (I mean terrorism as a general quotient here – the capacity of terrorists to cause harm), and a greater percentage of that terrorism would be aimed at the US and its interests. To whatever extent this is true nations participating in the global war on terror are effectively increasing their exposure in an asymmetrical way relative to the US. They aid in the reduction of terrorist capability against anyone while at the same time raising their own profile as targets. The US, already a target stands to gain disproportionately from both the reduction in total terrorism and the broader distribution of targets.

All of that said, where do we go from here? Where does the UK go? Italy? The US? As Paul Reynolds’ cogent analysis for the BBC suggests, there are no easy answers at this point for Britain. The situation for the US is possibly even more complicated, or at least it is reasonable to think that the response of global terrorism to changes in US policy will be even more gradual and/or inscrutable than Reynolds lays out.

Actions to this point have made disengagement from Iraq effectively impossible for the United States, if not for others. As K Klingensmith noted yesterday, it’s the nature of that engagement that will determine the outcome of our presence there. Condoleezza Rice’s observation that “we're dealing with a region of the world, the Middle East, that is not normal” is, I must say, awfully close to the opposite of the thoughtful recognition hoped for in yesterday’s post. The death of 50 people in London yesterday, and 29 in Iraq illustrate the stakes of moving beyond a strategy of simply trading punches and charges of barbarity.