London: Incoherent Rage watch

The rage isn't coming from Londoners. It's coming from the editorialists whose theory of terrorism, built around Saddam and WMD, has imploded. Leading off the pack is Friday's Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd; free link) lead editorial:

REVIEW & OUTLOOK
7/7/2005

Perhaps al Qaeda wanted to avoid that month-or-day-first confusion that has dogged the labelling of previous terrorist incidents.

Islamists are most dangerous when they sense weakness. And they can be forgiven for detecting it as they've watched debates in Europe and the U.S. in recent months. The calls to close Guantanamo, the recriminations over rendition of terror suspects, the demands for a "date certain" to withdraw from Iraq: In the mind of al Qaeda these are all signs of the West's flagging will to prevail.

Get it? If you criticise Gitmo or suspect-kidnappings, you're helping the terrorists.

And retreat from battling the Islamists in the Middle East would only make it easier for them to take the battle to us at home, as they did yesterday in London.

So "we're fighting them abroad so we don't have to fight them here at home" becomes "we're fighting them abroad so that we don't have to fight them at home even more."

As in Madrid, the London explosions lacked the diabolical audacity of flying planes into the Pentagon.

A minor point, but one should be precise about these things. A single plane flew into the Pentagon.

While each explosion is smaller, the cumulative death toll can still be terrible ... this Israelization of terror

When looking at everything through US goggles doesn't fit, try the Israeli ones.

In the wake of London, the political attacks on Guantanamo deserve special mention here. That detention center is designed to hold precisely the kind of stateless, uniform-less terrorists who carry out such attacks.

Leave aside the question of what court of law has made this determination about the Gitmo detainees. The British have Belmarsh for this purpose.

Bonus Points: Daniel Henninger's Wonder Land column across the page: (here's the subs. link, we'll add a free link in a few hours).

Their [Osama and al-Zarqawi] large-bore weapons in the terror war are modern electronic news technology and, ironically, open democratic societies.

WMDs = openness and democracy: If we read the papers and vote, the terrorists have already won!