Caught this at the end of a NYTimes piece about the probability that the London bombs were suicide bombings:
For smaller homegrown groups, like the one that acted in Madrid and whatever operation may have been behind the London attacks, the daily example of the havoc that can be created by suicide attacks in places like Iraq and Israel may have proved impossible to ignore.
And it occurred to me that, in all the talk about terrorist training ground and lives lost in this pitiful, pointless war, this is something that doesn't get a lot of discussion: the desensitizing of the entire world to extreme violence, caused by a full blown urban conflict involving America in the information age.
Also buried in this article is this interesting fact:
Palestinians have carried out more than 200 suicide attacks in the last decade, killing hundreds of Israeli soldiers and civilians. In Iraq, since the American invasion of 2003, more than 500 suicide bombings have been carried out by Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters aligned with them, at a toll of hundreds and hundreds of Iraqi and American lives.
I don't live in the U.S. anymore, and I don't watch much television news, but I remember whenever there was a suicide bombing in Israel, we heard about it. Loud and clear. I knew there were a lot of suicide bombings in Iraq, but if somebody hit you with a pop quiz and made you guess, would you have put it at more than double the number over the last ten years in Israel? I certainly wouldn't.
That says a lot about the incredible staying power of the Iraqi insurgency and the mind boggling importance with which it's fighters view it, but it also says a whole lot about the way this kind of violence, which used to garner rapt attention from the world every time it was carried out, has become almost passe.
It wouldn't even be appropriate to call the London suicide bombers copycats--they're just carrying out what probably was, to them, standard procedure. You're angry at the West, you're disaffected with your life, what the hell else are you going to do besides walk into some public space strapped with explosives and blow yourself up, taking as many nonbelievers with you as possible?
To be fair, this happens in London and it's shocking and big news. But it's not too hard to see this blossoming very quickly into something that, like Iraq, blends into the background noise of everyday life. And if it does, the poorly planned, poorly executed, pointless war in Iraq will no doubt be seen as the spark that set the fire.