Flickering thoughts on the London bombings...

Well, by now everyone knows about the London subway/bus bombings. I first found out this morning when I walked into work and someone pointed to the battered TV we keep on top of a cubical in our office and said "have you seen this" as Fox News showed images of the bombing.

I thought that the Flickr images, many from London (via the mother of all summaries at Instipundit were interesting. But more disturbing was the comments under the screen grabs that people had of Bush speaking - most of which involved calling him Chimpy, saying he should resign, lamenting that he gave countries reasons to launch terrorist attacks, and saying he was going to exploit this to political advantage and bomb some other country. (Flickr is down right now, so I can't direct-link to any of the pics, but if you keep looking for a Bush pic you'll see the comments).

Terrorism is never the answer. For all the rhetoric about the US killing kids in Iraq who were flying kites or whatever, the US does not intentionally attack civilian targets. Yes, there are innocent bystanders who are killed in war. Those should be taken into account when deciding to go to war and should be minimized. The cost of civilian lives should be weighed when decide if a war is the correct course of action. Saying that the US should not have attacked Iraq or Afgainistan because of the civilian casulaties, while not an argument I agree with, is a reasonable argument. However, equating civilian casulaties in war to an attack intentionally on civilians - on people riding buses and trains to go to work or school or shopping - is not a legitimate calculus. It's bad math.

So if London was attacked because of Iraq and Afganistan, if Bush brought this on London, then why did 9/11 occur? Of course, because the US "runs roughshod over other countries" as one Flickr poster put it. Except the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, a country that has gotten rich because of the oil (or as those on the left would say, the oooiiiil) bought by the US.

So will Bush "use this as an excuse to attack some other country"? Only if there is a country that needs attacking - but after the US beat the heck out of the Taliban in Afganistan, there is much less support for Al Queda than there was 4 years ago from countries of the world. If the evidence indicates there was another country sheltering or supporting the terrorists, then Bush will and should use force against them, but I have a feeling that will not be the case.

Some will say that Britian brought this on herself for supporting the US, that they should not have supported Afganinstan and Iraq, and that this is payback. As I've said before, attacks targeting civilians are never an appropriate way to settle disputes among countries. But I think there is another reason why Britian has been so loyal to us. When the Trade Center was hit, many - over 600- of the casualties were from the plane that hit Cantor Fitzgerald, a British bond trading company. Many of them were British citizens - I remember hearing that the British lost the 2nd largest number of citizens after the United States in the 9/11 attacks. September 11 in a way was also an attack on Britian, and they responded.