Michael Portillo in the Sunday Times:
Britain could be an Al-Qaeda target precisely because it is a nation divided and given to self-flagellation. After the Lockerbie bombing it fell to me as a transport minister to meet some of the grieving relatives. One man who had lost his daughter told me that he blamed airport security, not the terrorist. Even allowing for his suffering I can make no sense of the remark, but it seems to typify a misplaced magnanimity that springs from unwarranted collective guilt.
Terrorists are alive to our vulnerabilities. In 2004 Al-Qaeda attacked trains in Madrid hours before the Spanish general election. Jose Maria Aznar, ally of Bush and Blair, who had been expected to win, lost. The new government scurried to withdraw Spain’s troops from Iraq. Was Spain targeted because it supported America, or because it could be intimidated? Perhaps the US has been spared attacks at home since September 2001 partly because its security is good, but also partly because terror unites Americans more than it divides them.
In this country discontent with Blair’s foreign policy has reached fever pitch. From a pipsqueak parliamentary private secretary to Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, Labour politicians vie with each other to wear their conscience on their sleeve and distance themselves from Blair. As Israel fights terror the Tories are mealy mouthed and Gordon Brown is silent.
Might not Al-Qaeda reasonably believe that another massive atrocity could bring Blair’s leadership to an end and usher in a series of less hard-nosed administrations? Might they not also reason that Britain is a tempting target because in vast numbers the British refuse to recognise the nature of the extreme Islamist threat that confronts us?
For many Britons a new massacre would supply fresh evidence of the wickedness of the Iraq war or the plight of Palestinians or the downtrodden condition of British minorities. The more obvious explanation, that a group of religious fanatics is bent on destroying us and achieving world domination, would somehow elude them.
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