The Enemy

Let's see - we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here, Isn't that the story? But what about the "them" that are already here? Or maybe we're fighting them over there so England can fight them in London and Spain can fight them in Madrid. It's hard to make sense of it when you hold on to the idea that Muslim extremists are a well regulated militia with a chain of command, headquarters and a commander in chief. They're obviously not, but for the idea that by fighting "them" in Iraq, we're diminishing the hatred in the mean streets and nasty neighborhoods of London, Madrid, New York or anywhere else, is the kind of Joke that only George Bush and his crazed followers could sell as a strategy.

Despite CNN's early morning assurances that the Cars found on London streets showed the work of Al Qaeda and the Qaeda trained Iraqi insurgents, it wasn't. Their bombs work and their bomb makers understand that they shouldn't use British propane or petrol tanks that have features that make them almost explosion proof; that you don't combine high explosive / shrapnel devices with fuel/air devices and they know how to use a cell phone to properly detonate a bomb.

This job positively reeks of a clumsy amateur endeavor, poorly thought out and badly constructed, but that should be scarier than something you could trace to some centralized enemy. A walk through some London neighborhoods will show you the size of the city's underclass and maybe will hint at the traditional class warfare that has now taken on an ethnic and religious aspect.

Yes, the founder of al Qaeda is a rich man, part of a social elite and religiously motivated, but I suspect the people who bungled this car bomb attack were home grown and the spawn of London's slums and social segregation. There's no "over there" involved.