For two interesting columns by Londoners accustomed to taking the pulse of their nation, check out Polly Toynbee's column in The Guardian this morning and Tim Sebastian's op-ed in the International Herald Tribune. Both strike similar chords, emphasizing the famous resilience of Londoners, the inevitability of the attacks, and the likelihood that this will simply stiffen the famous British upper lip a little further and create more support for Blair.

Two points stand out, though.

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The pictures from London, many of them taken by people walking through tube tunnels to safety or standing by the carcass of a shattered bus, bring back horrible memories: the dust and shock, the numb bewilderment on so many faces, the frantic cell phone calls to try to locate loved ones, the business of an ordinary day blown up in smoke. Our hearts go out to all Londoners. Even so, as a British journalist friend just emailed me, “The astounding thing is that 6 bombs have caused relatively few deaths (35ish) and serious injuries, when the great fear was that even one might cause apalling death.”

Astounding indeed. After all the predictions of apocalyptic terrorism, the assurances that we are in a new era in which al Qaeda’s chief goal must be to top its last attack in drama and number of deaths (hence the overriding likelihood that it will try to acquire and use a weapon of mass destruction), we seem to be back to fairly ordinary – albeit horrible – bombings of transport systems. Islamic terrorists alone have carried out scores of these kinds of attacks in Europe and elsewhere over the last three decades (the Algerian bombings of the Paris metro in the mid-1990s is just one example), with varying death tolls; not to mention similar attacks by the IRA, and in the 1970s, the Red Brigades (remember the bombing of the Bologna train station)?

Moreover, the British emergency services and hospitals have performed superbly, showing what an investment in planning, coordination, and public health can yield. The financial gurus are already predicting that the impact on the markets will be slight; Londoners themselves are famous for their resilience under fire; and Tony Blair and his fellow G-8 leaders have already made getting on with their prepared agenda a mark of victory over terrorism. Indeed, it is likely they will do a little more than they might have otherwise, just to prove that they can be neither distracted nor deterred.

None of this is in any way meant to minimize the loss, the grief, and the emotional impact of any terrorist attack. But what are we to make of this for the war on terror?

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Second prize to the reader who identifies the source of the following quote from 1996; first prize to the reader who admits it makes them think a bit.

I'm with Jim on this one. The Democrats need a strategy for winning in Iraq, not just a platform for partisan polemics. As some of the responses to my previous posts amply demonstrate, there are folks out there who would rather see the resistance win in Iraq than ever admit the Bush administration did anything right. I am not standing up for their decision to get into this war (although I am still willing to say that given what we thought we knew at the time, the decision was much more plausible than it looks in retrospect, as unpopular as that position has become, and I was and remain strongly opposed to the way they chose to do it, in virtually every respect), but the question has to be: what do we do now?

Our strategy has to be to agree with the goal of as free and prosperous an Iraq as possible (Senator Biden recently spoke of a "participatory republic") and then to hold the Administration's feet to the fire at every turn for incompetence and empty rhetoric. Why should we care? Because of the death of the young Knight-Ridder journalist that Ivo passed on -- for him and his family and thousands if not millions of Iraqis like him who see an actual chance for a decent life. Those people have put their trust in us, regardless of how we got into Iraq, and they and the world are watching to see what we do now.

We have to have an affirmative strategy not for winning the war in Iraq, but for building a durable peace. And here again, the Administration is all hat and no cattle. Look again at the President's speech. He announced: "our strategy going forward has both a military track and a political track." Then he spent 8 paragraphs talking about the military track. When he finally turned to the political track, he said: "The other critical element of our strategy is to help ensure that the hopes Iraqis expressed at the polls in January are translated into a secure democracy." And what specifically are we doing to secure those hopes? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, other than cheering on what the Iraqis are trying to do themselves in "building the institutions of a free society."

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