Daniel Henninger thinks something significant has happened here following the July 7 London Tube bombings.
In the four weeks since this happened, I have talked about it, on the West Coast and East Coast, with people one could describe as "non-Bush voters." To a man and woman, they say in so many words that the time has come to "get tough on the terrorists." One event, London, appears to have caused an internal reassessment among some Americans formerly ambivalent about the war on terror.I think for some, what happened [on September 11] --passenger planes flown into buildings, the slow death of the towers--was just too much, off the charts, a trauma and a personal concussion. Something like that.
July 7 London was more comprehensible. Americans were able to absorb London more clinically, observers from afar. London also happened to an English-speaking people, so every televised comment back to the U.S., from the first witnesses to the police reports of apprehended and named terrorists, was understood and internalized. Then the British media, God bless them, reduced the madness to one, right cliché: The bombers are our neighbors. Three years in, the battle lines finally come clear.
The sleeper cells, if they're sharp, will play cricket and pump gas for two years while the West's politicians and editorialists convince the new antiterror recruits that the war's tactics are still worse than the threat.
I think the burden for preventing that, for consolidating the new center-left recruits, lies with President Bush. The post-9/11 slumber was both psychological and political. It became a partisan mindset. London was electroshock therapy. Mr. Bush needs to speak to his public opposition, suggest some understanding of their former discomfort and restate the stakes. Why? Because the widest and deepest possible popular opposition to Islam's homicidal strain is crucial to ending it. Their primary target is the public will. They need to see, not now but two years from now, amid a presidential election, that on July 7, they blew it.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Alan at August 5, 2005 08:43 AM