As a long-term veteran of the Middle East, Robert Fisk has seen war up close like few other journalists globally.
Today he has penned his thoughts about yesterday's attacks in London. Essentially - it is foolish to think that insurgents will remain in the Mideast and retaliation was to be expected.
The reality of this barbaric bombing
If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us think insurgency won't come to us?
"If you bomb our cities," Osama bin Laden said in one of his recent video tapes, "we will bomb yours." There you go, as they say. It was crystal clear Britain would be a target ever since Tony Blair decided to join George Bush's "war on terror" and his invasion of Iraq. We had, as they say, been warned. The G8 summit was obviously chosen, well in advance, as Attack Day.
More below the jump
I felt that Mr. Fisk's opinions were something worth reading this morning. He provides a rational set of arguments from the left side - based on his many experiences in the Middle East. He delivers his thoughts, without as much of the baggage that affects others on the left wing (i.e. George Galloway's comments yesterday).
I am not saying that this article is not controversial. He'll get his scheduled deliveries of hate mail from the blind Bush sycophants.
He states the obvious - that the attack isn't really against the UK, rather to isolate the US.
And it's no use Mr Blair telling us yesterday that "they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear". "They" are not trying to destroy "what we hold dear". They are trying to get public opinion to force Blair to withdraw from Iraq, from his alliance with the United States, and from his adherence to Bush's policies in the Middle East. The Spanish paid the price for their support for Bush - and Spain's subsequent retreat from Iraq proved that the Madrid bombings achieved their objectives - while the Australians were made to suffer in Bali.
He provides incredibly critical criticism of the British Intelligence. One has to wonder if the ineptness of Bush for political gains discussed yesterday was a key factor in this.
A co-ordinated system of attacks of the kind we saw yesterday would have taken months to plan - to choose safe houses, prepare explosives, identify targets, ensure security, choose the bombers, the hour, the minute, to plan the communications (mobile phones are giveaways).
Co-ordination and sophisticated planning - and the usual utter ruthlessness with regard to the lives of the innocent - are characteristic of al-Qa'ida. And let us not use - as our television colleagues did yesterday - "hallmarks", a word identified with quality silver rather than base metal.
And now let us reflect on the fact that yesterday, the opening of the G8, so critical a day, so bloody a day, represented a total failure of our security services - the same intelligence "experts" who claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there were none, but who utterly failed to uncover a months-long plot to kill Londoners.
For those who think that there will be another spectacular attack on obvious targets - he notes that it is not needed.
Trains, planes, buses, cars, metros. Transportation appears to be the science of al-Qa'ida's dark arts. No one can search three million London commuters every day. No one can stop every tourist. Some thought the Eurostar might have been an al-Qa'ida target - be sure they have studied it - but why go for prestige when your common or garden bus and Tube train are there for the taking.
Let us not think that we are immune to anti-Arab racism - even Robert himself (after years in the mideast and being a fluent speaker of Arabic) succumbed to the hysteria after September 11th.
I remember, crossing the Atlantic on 11 September 2001 - my plane turned round off Ireland when the US closed its airspace - how the aircraft purser and I toured the cabins to see if we could identify any suspicious passengers. I found about a dozen, of course, totally innocent men who had brown eyes or long beards or who looked at me with "hostility". And sure enough, in just a few seconds, Osama bin Laden turned nice, liberal, friendly Robert into an anti-Arab racist.
He hazards us about how this will bring out the ugly racist underbelly of society - and that Mr. Blair has to accept much responsibility for it.
But here's the problem. To go on pretending that Britain's enemies want to destroy "what we hold dear" encourages racism;
what we are confronting here is a specific, direct, centralised attack on London as a result of a "war on terror" which Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara has locked us into. Just before the US presidential elections, Bin Laden asked: "Why do we not attack Sweden?"
Lucky Sweden. No Osama bin Laden there. And no Tony Blair.