The thing that annoys me about the
terrorist bombings in London is not the damage done, or even the lives lost, but the fact that it achieves absolutely nothing.
I'm not too bothered about the damage to the city - everyone's insured to the back teeth and has more than enough money to cope with it. Businesses can cope with a few days off without too much harm to the bottom line. The transport network will recover.
In some ways I even find it difficult to be that affected by the deaths. Every day people die around the world in wars, murders, road accidents, not to mention
Geldof's bugbear of choice. Every day people I don't know die. In some ways this is just another 37 of them gone.
Now obviously I mean no disrespect to the dead, and my sympathies go to those who have lost those close to them; my point is just that for me this is another fairly distant tragedy. I feel like it would show rather a skewed view on the world if I was somehow more upset about these people I don't know dying than about the countless others who die every day, just because they died on the same chunk of land that I live on. Likewise, going to work this morning wasn't as scary for me as it no doubt was for many Londoners, so I can't even relate on the basis of being in the same place.
What does frustrate me though, as I say, is that this achieves nothing. The terrorists have some grand notion that they are doing some great work of God, as
the letter claiming responsibility makes clear. This idea that they are somehow teaching us a lesson for our "Zionist" actions in the Middle East and that we are going to bend to their demands. Newsflash! When has Britain ever negotiated with terrorists? It's a long standing policy that it isn't done. You can't have your hand forced by terrorists, because if you do it once you'll end up changing your foreign policy for any old Johnny Foreigner with a knocked off AK-47 and half a pound of semtex. The 9/11 attacks have resulted in plenty of changes to internal policies in the US (much to the chagrin of many Americans, I know) but all it's done outside their borders is give them an excuse to bomb the hell out of Afghanistan and Iraq, further enraging the terrorists. Well done Al Qaeda, that plan - shockingly - backfired.
The attacks on London will cost a lot of money in clean up and repairs. They will cost a lot of police time in catching whoever was behind it. They have already cost many lives, and have damaged many more both physically and emotionally. What the attacks won't do is change any of our policies regarding the Middle East. Then, very likely, the government will use them as leverage to push through unwanted and damaging legislation like the incitement to religious hatred bill and good old ID cards, neither of which would have prevented this from happening.
It's just stupid. It achieves nothing and just makes the terrorists seem even less civilised, such that they have even less respect from us and making us even less likely to listen to them. They could have killed 37 rabbits and had the same effect, though at least then they wouldn't have the whole of MI5 after them. As it is people are dead and others are grieving, and London has a few more repairs to do to it's tube network. Well done, genii, you've achieved nothing.
What a senseless waste of human life.
