After London

The NY Sun:

The terrorist attacks Thursday morning in London offer a stark reminder about the war on terror. It's easy to forget amid the political rhetoric in America, but the real evildoers aren't the guards at Guantanamo, but the murderers setting off bombs aimed at killing civilians in rush hour.

There is, in other words, a real threat, a real enemy. It is not a figment of President Bush's imagination, as some critics contend. The consequences of failing to defeat the terrorists are deadly - at least 37 killed in four bombs in the London transit system. And more than 700 injured, many of them seriously. A group calling itself "The Secret Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe" claimed responsibility. The British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said the attacks "bore all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda." READ MORE

London now joins Madrid - where four commuter trains were blown up March 11 last year, killing 191 people - as another European target of global terrorism. They join a worldwide list that includes New York, Jerusalem, Bali, Baghdad, and Beslan, among others.

The attacks came as President Bush was in Great Britain at the G-8 summit, and as the Israeli finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was visiting London. Mr. Bush had the matter right yesterday when he said, "On the one hand, we have people here who are working to alleviate poverty, to help rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS, working on ways to have a clean environment. And on the other hand, you've got people killing innocent people." Said the president, "the contrast couldn't be clearer between the intentions and the hearts of those of us who care deeply about human rights and human liberty, and those who kill - those who have got such evil in their heart that they will take the lives of innocent folks."

Mr. Bush is ahead of his domestic opposition in that he understands the nature of the threat. Yet the fact that the terrorists were able to strike an American ally is a signal that, nearly four years after September 11, 2001, there is yet more to be done to prosecute the offensive. A terrorism-sponsoring regime still holds power in Iran, which Mr. Bush named just months after September 11 as part of the "Axis of Evil."

Syria and Saudi Arabia are funding terrorist groups, and the regime in Syria, as American officials have repeatedly declared, is harboring terrorist groups. The morning after an attack like the one yesterday in London is a time to make the case to the world that such regimes and such behavior is unacceptable.

Changing it will not require American invasions of Damascus or Riyadh or Tehran. There are freedom fighters in place who are desperately seeking American support and who can do the job with small amounts of training and financial support. The democratic revolution in Ukraine recently was a nonviolent one and could be a model for what could occur in Iran or Saudi Arabia or Damascus if America and Britain committed themselves to such a strategy.

It would be a strategy worth pursuing even if yesterday's bombings in London turn out to be the work of some renegade Irish group or the British equivalent of Timothy McVeigh. There have been enough lives lost already in Jerusalem and New York and Virginia and Pennsylvania and Madrid to demonstrate that the threat of Islamic extremist terror is genuine and costly. What the London attacks underscore is that there is a race underway between Washington and the terrorists. Either we defeat them first on their own ground - in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Iran, even sections of Iraq and Pakistan where they are now active - or some morning we will wake up, and instead of conventional attacks on the London buses and subways, horrible as they were, we will be watching on television the news of a nuclear or biological or chemical weapon attack on New York.