Again, some swift thoughts on last weeks bombs. Forgive me if, as seems likely, they get overtaken by events. Analysis is a pretty perishable commodity these days.
The police have just announced that they were the work of four (or more) men who may well have died in the attacks and were from North Yorkshire. This indicates a 'homegrown' cell rather than the 'European' option preferred over the weekend by many pundits.
It will be some time before the identity of the bombers is known and until more details emerge it would be wrong to speculate. How everything is linked is far from clear and will remain unclear for a while.
However what is perhaps more significant is the intention behind the bombings. This might give us some indication as to, in very general terms, who might be behind them.
Terrorist violence is intended to have effects. It is, we can suppose, directed at securing specific results. A key question is what those results might be.
Many people have said there is no obvious set of demands that the bombers behind the London attack and those in Madrid, Istanbul, Casablanca etc. have made public. In fact, as the voluminous writings and statements of bin Laden and others have made clear that is not quite the case. There are demands, they just appear so far-fetched and are couched in such outlandish language, that we cannot really credit them with any practical significance.
Perhaps a more fruitful way of analysing the intention behind the bombing is by working backwards, by looking at its effects and wondering who would want to cause them. This is a familiar investigative technique for murders and so on and has an obvious application here.
Terrorist violence - like all spectacular public violence from public executions to lynchings - involves three, or perhaps four, groups of people. There are the victims - those directly affected by the violence; there are the bombers themselves; and there are the witnesses or the audience. The victims are the tools through which the bombers reach their audience - especially in this age of mass media. So what do the bombers want from their bombs?
As ever there are different motivations. Some are personal. Some bombers act because they want revenge, because they are angry, because they feel humiliated, because they have failed at everything else. Conrad's The Secret Agent describes a man who carries a bomb on the top deck of a London bus because he likes the feeling of power it gives him. Jean Paul Sartre's short work Herostratus, based on the classical story, describes an arsonist who wants to be remembered by posterity. Some of Doris Lessing's work examines the almost nihilistic hate, often rooted in very personal resentments, felt by some militants. Some bombers are simply sadistic. Few, however, are insane or psychopathic.
In addition to these personal motives there are those of a more practical nature. Much here depends on the reaction, or anticipated reaction, of the audience. Will those watching see the killers as murderers or freedom fighters? The audience can, from the point of view of the bombers, be split into those who are potentially supporters and those who are definitely hostile. Of course the vast proportion of people, both in the UK, the West more generally and indeed among the world's Muslim population are viscerally opposed to the sort of violence we saw last week.
But others may be less unambiguous in their condemnation. The September 11th attacks brought an ambivalent response from many in the Middle East. They condemned the attack but said they understood what motivated it. For others, repugnant conspiracy theories blaming Jews for the strikes provided a useful way out of the moral and ethical problem it posed them. Spectacular violence in the name of a cause forces witnesses to decide on the rights and wrongs of the act and of the causes and grievances that supposedly motivated it. The audience has to decide who they are with, and who they are against. As such, public violence is a hugely effective way of dividing communties, of radicalising and mobilising.
So, personal or practical motives for last week's attacks? A critical element here is whether the bombers blew themsevles up or not. If the attacks did not deliberately involve the death of the attackers, my sense at the moment is that we should focus more on personal motives. Few terrorist planners, even before Madrid, thought that attacking the tube would build support for them. The Madrid attacks were roundly condemned by almost everyone in the Islamic world. No one could genuinely have thought that striking commuters by just leaving bombs and running away could rally anyone to their cause. This would leave us with a bunch of semi-criminal misfits, or a very local British-based group with little more general awareness, acting out of twisted personal motives rather than an al-Qaeda 'A team' committed to a general jihad. Religion may not have even been a particularly powerful motivating force, more a legitimising device for activities that sprung from a combination of personal impulses and small group dynamics.
But suicide bombers are the ... well ... smart bomb of the propaganda war. They are an incredibly sophisticated weapon that taps into all sorts of myths of heroic resistance, death and of course martyrdom. They make people decide: murderer or martyr. If the attacks were suicide bombs then the motivation may have been more practical than personal and the group we are up against far more professional than previously thought.
But, like I say, we simply don't know right now.
