Once again, Blair has captured the public mood, shaped it and given it expression. As if there were any doubt that the intentions of the bombers were to spread "fear, terror and panic throughout the north, south, east and west of Britain", in the words of the Secret Organisation's statement. The implication is that al-Qa'ida is engaged in a military campaign in pursuit of negotiable objectives.Not even George Galloway believes that. He said on Newsnight on Friday that the terrorists did not have objectives that it was possible to meet: they should be hunted down and shot.
Then he sounded positively Blairite, saying that the legitimate grievances of Muslims around the world, such as in Palestine, should be tackled. Matthew Parris, when Kenneth Bigley was taken hostage in Iraq and killed last year, wrote in The Times that we were "asking for it", and that Britain should "cut and run" from Iraq, "the sooner the better". He was doing it on purpose, but the surrender-now mentality is more insidious at the BBC because it is unconscious. Within hours of the bombs going off on Thursday, the BBC website's reporting had been bowdlerised, with the word "terrorists" removed and replaced with "bombers". Despite the best efforts of George Galloway and his witting and unwitting allies, there is little demand, even from those who opposed the war, for British troops to pull out of Iraq.
The terrorists misread the Spanish election last year, assuming that it was the Madrid bombings that drove Spanish troops out of Iraq. The fact is that it was not the cowardice of the Spanish electorate which elected the anti-war socialist party, but the miscalculation of Jos?aria Aznar, the conservative prime minister, who panicked and tried to blame the bombings on Eta, the Basque separatists. That was a terrible, terrible mistake and gave succour to al-Qa'ida. If Aznar had done as Blair did, and said it was "reasonably obvious" that the bombs were the work of al-Qa'ida and declared the nation would not be intimidated, he might still be the PM.It is a mistake some people are still eager for Blair to make. What is more, Afghanistan was a campaign largely fought by the Afghans themselves, with US military help from the air, explicitly authorised by the United Nations and supported by virtually all Muslim and Arab countries.That is why Blair is on strong ground. Because if military action in Afghanistan is a cause of terrorism here, it is not as if we could have made ourselves safe - or make ourselves safe in future - simply by ducking out of Iraq.
