http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/08/27/do2702 .xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/08/27/ixopinion.html Imagine the bombs had gone off: how would Britain have changed? By Niall Ferguson (Filed: 27/08/2006) Sunday Telegraph
Maybe it's because I know I have to catch a transatlantic flight on September 11. Maybe I am just too fond of "What if?" historical questions. Whatever the reason, I can't get over how quickly the world has moved on since the exposure of the Heathrow bomb plot. Ever since the revelation that a terrorist ring intended "mass murder on an unimaginable scale", I have been finding it all too easy to imagine what it would have been like if they had succeeded. I think we owe it to ourselves, not to mention the policemen whose months of patient surveillance foiled the plot, to picture the scenario as clearly as we can. We cannot assume, for obvious legal reasons, that the 11 suspects who were charged in London on Tuesday are anything other than innocent, as they themselves maintain. Nor should we speculate about the other people who are still in custody awaiting possible charges. All we know, because Peter Clarke, the head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism branch, told us last week, is that the police possess "highly significant video and audio recordings" of the suspects. Since they were arrested on the night of August 10, a total of "69 houses, flats and business premises, vehicles and open spaces" have been searched. No fewer than 400 computers, 200 mobile phones and 8,000 data storage devices have been impounded, providing more than 6,000 gigabytes of potential evidence. Police have also found bomb-making chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, and electrical components, as well as "a number of video recordings sometimes referred to as martyrdom videos". But maybe all that electronic data will turn out to be no more than downloaded ringtones. Maybe the peroxide was simply to bleach someone's hair. Maybe those videos were just innocent home movies. So let us merely hypothesise that some young British Muslims really were plotting to assemble bombs out of liquid-based explosives and iPod-shaped detonators and to blow them up aboard a number of planes while in mid-Atlantic. Suppose it had happened yesterday. Imagine yourself, in a parallel universe, turning on the radio to get the latest football scores and instead hearing the following news bulletin: "Five passenger aircraft have blown up in mid-air and crashed into the Atlantic. The planes, believed to be operated by American Airlines and United Airlines, left this morning from Heathrow airport, bound for destinations in the United States. "According to a statement by the Home Secretary, the explosions occurred within minutes of one another. There are no reported survivors. "World leaders have united in condemning those responsible for the bombings." Following American dating conventions, such a calamity would at once have been dubbed "8/26". But the political consequences would have been very different from those that followed the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Five years ago, the world reacted with astounding unanimity. True, Osama bin Laden and his confederates exulted. So did a rent-a-mob of America-hating pseudo-intellectuals. Most people, however, were simply horrified by the loss of innocent life. There was almost no difference in the mood on the two sides of the Atlantic. "Nous sommes tous américains," wrote Jean-Marie Colombani in Le Monde. Londoners felt an intense empathy with New Yorkers. At the same time, 9/11 generated a surge of patriotic feeling in the targeted country. Americans rallied around a president who had been in office for less than a year, having come to power by the most contentious of margins. After some initial fumbling, George W Bush found the words his countrymen wanted to hear: words that pledged righteous retribution. It would have been diametrically different, though, on 8/26. From an American vantage point, a successful terrorist plot launched from Heathrow would have been doubly Britain's fault. Its proximate cause would have been a lapse in UK security. Its root cause would have been the infiltration of English society by radical Islamism. As details emerged about the perpetrators, Americans' worst suspicions about Britain would have been confirmed. It has been clear for some time that Britain's Muslim communities are proving fertile recruiting grounds for Islamist extremists, and that it is the disaffected sons and grandsons of Pakistani immigrants who are most susceptible. Since August 10, American reporters have been crawling all over High Wycombe and Walthamstow, just as they invaded Beeston in Leeds last summer, trying vainly to understand the baffling phenomenon of "Eurabia". Perhaps even more troubling, it has been evident since the arrest of the shoe-bomber Richard Reid that ordinary British dropouts, not born into the Islamic faith, can also be lured into the terrorist network via conversion. Imagine if it had been established that one of the perpetrators of the worst terrorist outrages since 9/11 had been the son of a respected Conservative Party official with a double-barrelled name. Suspicion of British passports is already detectable in the United States. I find that when I use my own passport as ID when checking in for domestic flights in America, I am invariably subjected to a full body search. A successful Heathrow bomb plot would have quadrupled this suspicion. Far from editorialising that "We Are All British Now", the American press might well have reacted to 8/26 by saying: "The British Are All Suspects Now." The Atlantic would have dramatically widened. The domestic consequences of 8/26 would have been different, too. Far from rallying around an embattled leader, British voters would most likely have turned on Tony Blair. Even as things stand, there is complete disillusionment with him. According to a poll in last week's Times, just 1 per cent of voters think that the Government's policy towards the Middle East has improved this country's safety, while 72 per cent think it has made Britain more of a target. An earlier poll for The Spectator found that although 73 per cent of us agree with George Bush that we are engaged in a "global war against Islamic terrorists", only 15 per cent believe that Britain should continue to align itself closely with the US, compared with 46 per cent who favour closer ties with Europe. This, above all, is why Labour is being punished in the polls this summer. If 8/26 had happened, the party's support would have gone into freefall. Small wonder that Gordon Brown is already putting it about that (in the words of a recent article by David Mepham of the Institute for Public Policy Research) "he would probably want to distance himself from aspects of Bush's foreign policy". Mark Leonard of the Centre for European Reform expects to see "a more hard-headed brand of Atlanticism" once Brown becomes Prime Minister. If an 8/26 catastrophe had catapulted Mr Brown into 10 Downing Street, the Atlantic would have widened still further. Moreover, whereas 9/11 united Americans (albeit ephemerally), Britain would have been torn apart by 8/26, with the possibility of violent confrontation from Bradford to Brick Lane. According to a YouGov poll published in Friday's Daily Telegraph, nearly one in five people believe that "a large proportion of British Muslims feel no sense of loyalty to this country and are prepared to condone or even carry out acts of terrorism". Six years ago, only 32 per cent of those polled said they felt "threatened" by Islam. Today that figure is 53 per cent. The feeling of alienation is decidedly mutual. A recent Pew global survey found that 81 per cent of British Muslims consider themselves to be Muslims first and British second. (Only Pakistan has a higher percentage of people who put their religion ahead of their nationality.) 8/26 could have been the trigger for the next English civil war. Last week, New York magazine asked a diverse group of journalists to answer the question "What if 9/11 never happened?" Their responses made entertaining, sometimes even funny, reading. But the question "What if 8/26 had happened?" is no laughing matter, especially as so many of us suspect that sooner or later, something like it is bound to happen for real. Niall Ferguson's new book, The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred, has just been published by Penguin Books. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/exit.jhtml?exit=http://www.niallferguson .org/> www.niallferguson.org/ © Niall Ferguson, 2006 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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