INTELLIGENT BOMBERS WOULD NEVER ATTACK LONDON

ANDREW COHEN
You have to wonder about the terrorists. Not their morality. Their intelligence.

After all, if you're a terrorist, you want to kill a lot of people and sow a lot of hysteria. You want to ruin the economy, shatter law and order, cause anguish and anxiety. You want to create havoc, chaos, confusion, a biblical calamity akin to the Ten Plagues, the Black Death, the Great Fire, the Great Depression, Nanking and Hiroshima. Getting the most bang from the bomb is what counts. You want Armageddon.

To do that, though, you need the right target. You need to terrify a people who are feckless, aimless and spineless. They must have no sense of themselves, no purpose in the world and no awareness of their history.

You need a people with no idea of community or solidarity. You need a people new to the randomness of violence and uncertain how to respond when it strikes them. They must be without leaders who can inspire, without men and women who command respect as well armies.

If you need all these things in place to pull off the Apocalypse, then, why on God's green Earth would you bomb London? Why, pray tell, would you attack the British? Practically speaking, did you think this through?

Surely there were better targets. Of the 191 members of the United Nations, you could have found another densely populated, highly industrialized nation of Judeo-Christian values where you could have done some real damage, psychologically and spiritually.

It makes one wonder where these dim-witted renegades went to school. If they're from abroad, it seems they never learned about the legendary temperament of the British. If they're British, they never learned that attacking their compatriots in this way will have the opposite effect. If anything, it will put more steel in the British spine.

The reason? Character and history. Each, in its way, makes the British the tough, stolid, resolute, optimistic, storied people that they are. Beyond the Israelis, the British are the most unlikely people on Earth to succumb to fear.

Consider these two declarations of defiance from London last week:

"The people who did this should know they have failed," said a hand-written sign on the steps of a church. "They have picked the wrong city to pick on. London will go on." Said another: "You think you will defeat us? Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London."

Had the bombers accepted that polite offer, this is what they would have found in London, and in the highlands of Scotland and the hills of the Lake District and the lanes of Oxford and everywhere else in that small, plucky island:

They would have found a people who know terrorism and aren't afraid of it. Since the 1970s, the British have lived with the Irish Republican Army, which took its murderous campaign to the steps of 10 Downing Street. When bombs explode, the British know how to respond with speed, skill and understatement. It's why the IRA attacks were known as "the Troubles" as the recent attacks are called "the incidents."


The terrorists would have found a people with a past. After all, it was the British who stood alone against Hitler and Nazism in 1940, when they could have lost the war.

Instead, they won the Battle of Britain and withstood the Blitz. Centuries earlier, these are the people who turned back the Spanish and their Armada, and defeated the French at Trafalgar and Waterloo.

They would have found, these terrorists would, the people of Winston Churchill and Horatio Nelson. They would have found a nation of towering literary, artistic, philosophical, commercial and scientific achievement -- Shakespeare, Chaucer, Elgar, Turner, Darwin, Newton, Wren and Watt.

They would have found a people of decency, equanimity and modesty.

"One of the charms of the British is that they have so little idea of their own virtues, and nowhere is this more true than with their happiness," observes Bill Bryson, an American, who calls Britons "the happiest people on earth."

They would also have found a people who tolerate bad food, bad telephones, bad service, bad weather, lager louts and long queues, all cheerfully.

No matter. When the bombs went off, the fire brigade responded quickly. The prime minister and the Queen spoke eloquently, giving roar to this lion of a people who know, fundamentally, who they are.

Sadly, there will be more terrible bombs in London. We are about to enter, as Sir Winston said in the early days of the last war, "a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."

Fear not. No one endures like the British. No one.