Resilient In Britain

Anne Applebaum writes in the Washington Post today that London is reacting stoically to the recent attempts at terror bombing. She attributes that to the superiority of Western culture to the tolls the terrorists use.

First, the London bombers failed because they were amateurish. The British branch of al-Qaeda, or of al-Qaeda imitators, does not have weapons of mass destruction, whether biological, chemical or nuclear. Nor does it have even Semtex, the plastic explosive favored by the IRA. If the group in Britain has supporters in the governments or secret services of foreign countries, they aren't very resourceful supporters: The car bombs were made of tanks of propane gas and rusty nails. These turned out to be covered with fingerprints and other forensic evidence, enabling British police to carry out raids and make arrests across the country over the weekend.

It's likely that the perpetrators will have been observed by one of central London's multiple video cameras as well: Though we sometimes think otherwise, Western technology is still far superior to the tools available to would-be terrorists.

More important, though, the London bomb plot failed because open Western societies are more resilient than we sometimes think they are. One of the Piccadilly car bombs was discovered because an ambulance crew, responding to an unrelated call, saw smoke seeping from a car trunk and alerted the police. The other car was illegally parked, and London's super-vigilant, much-hated traffic wardens towed it to a parking lot, where someone noticed that it smelled of gasoline and alerted the police.

I'd only point out one thing: the people trying to pull this off may have been clumsy or even stupid - but the devices they were trying to set off are deadly if built and detonated properly. For example, CNN has a cheerful little "how-to" video (which they deny is a how-to) which shows just how deadly one of these improvised car bombs can be. It is not at all amusing, nor would the results be amateurish. Note the size and intensity of the fireball.

UPDATE: Bob Owens is not at all impressed with CNN's car bomb, incidentally. He's got video of a properly detonated fuel-air explosive to show how devastating one can be. Frankly, I wouldn't want to be anywhere either one of the bombs, thank you.

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1. Blue Crab Boulevard » And Now For Something Completely Different — Tuesday, 3 July , 2007 @ 7:47 am