Khalid Masood of Kent, first ploughed through pedestrians on the Westminster Bridge in his rented car and, after crashing the car on to the very railings of the UK Parliament, was still able to walk 70 metres (yards) round the street corner, enter an open side gate of the Parliament and, had time to fatally stab a policeman before being shot down. All this happened during a few minutes about 2.30 p.m. on a blustery Wednesday afternoon in London, last week.
Even as the UK reels over a bout of street violence by a single man at its very heart of political power, the most bombastic President of the world’s most powerful nation has received a resounding slap by the very Washington Establishment he vowed to de-throne. The drama and sensation of the car and knife attack by a single 52-year-old Britisher near the UK Parliament in London, however, overshadowed the political stand-off between the US presidency and its national legislature over a most significant draft law.
That difference in public impact between violence by a single man who killed 5 people (including himself) on the one hand, and, the clash of far more powerful political energies between the US President and Congress on the other, is noteworthy. The greater ‘shock and awe’ caused by Masood’s 15-minute attack is what violent anti-State forces have long termed as ‘armed propaganda’.
Even as western TV news channels were reporting the post-attack scene in central London, one British security expert on-air criticized a seeming ‘overkill’ element of the immediate response to the attack by the UK police. He pointed out that the UK security forces had come rushing to the scene in overwhelming numbers in response to an attack by a single man – clearly with little military fitness – who had already been shot dead.
TV viewers will recall the ranked police cars, back-up unit vehicles, ambulances and the hundreds of armed and unarmed police offices and emergency personnel crowding those two or three narrow streets on one flank of the UK Parliament building (known as the Palace of Westminster).
Sri Lankans are veterans of an internal war that saw ethnic pogroms engulf whole cities, multiple vehicle bombs and suicide bombers who killed presidents and other national leaders and, almost destroyed the Central Bank among other key installations killing hundreds in a single attack. They will recall devastating aerial and artillery bombardment as precursors to ground offensives in the north-eastern war zone. Our experience of (home-grown) insurgency and counter-insurgency gives us a good perspective.
That expert on TV was pointing to two things. Firstly, the disproportionate scale of the security response in London AFTER the attack (and not during) showed the shock effect engineered by a ‘lone perpetrator’ whose violence does not compare in scale with either the IRA urban bombings in the 1960s and ‘70s or, even the more recent Islamist terrorist attacks on the London Underground trains system.
This shock effect created with the minimum deployment of assets (number of perpetrators, cost/quantum of materials expended) is very useful for non-State actors who cannot match the capacities of the State they are fighting. Such non-state actors lack both resources, as well as, the opportunities to act due to their illegality and relative smallness of their supportive constituency. Thus, a small armed strike can have a much larger propaganda outcome. A whole Gulf War by the world’s biggest military alliance is not needed to create ‘shock and awe’. Now, it seems to be happening in reverse.
Secondly, that western expert was also criticizing the thinness of the existing security blanket on the ground in London. Even after all that commotion created by ploughing into people along the whole length of a bridge just next to the Parliament, the security around the Parliament block was so thin that the attacker had time to crash his car on to the Parliament railings and then go round the corner on an open street and enter the Parliament compound itself without resistance. Surely, after all that commotion outside, one would expect that enough officers inside the Parliament compound would have their weapons at the ready.
Instead, a single unarmed (but experienced) ‘Bobby’ at that wide open compound gate fell victim to Masood’s knife attack. And there is yet uncertainty whether it took a bodyguard of a parliamentarian to come out to shoot down the attacker or, whether there were other officers actually on duty at the gate who (belatedly) found and used their guns on Masood. Even if there were only just one or two officers at the gate, clearly their reaction time was slow. Worse, even during a parliamentary sitting, there seems not to have been any guard points or patrolling officers outside Parliament, around the perimeter of the building.
For a large and rich city like London, that has experienced urban guerrilla violence over several decades, to be so relaxed is indicative of a complacency that, in ethnic conflict infested Sri Lanka, would have been deemed ‘unpatriotic’ as well as criminally negligent. Many Western politicians will argue that an overtly relaxed security arrangement in the heart of a huge tourism industry – leave aside the location’s political importance – was necessary to ensure public morale and the dignity of a powerful state.
That very complacency, then, results in extreme shock and possible panic reactions.
Many business travellers might complain of such a ‘panic reaction’ in last week’s sudden ban by the US on the carrying of laptops and other electronic devices bigger than a mobile phone on board flights from airports in designated Muslim-majority countries. After all, aren’t there enough other airports around the world from which to transport any attacking device into the US? After the London attack, the UK may follow suit. Germany and France may, too.
How about the UK as an exporter of ‘Islamist terror’? Parliament attacker Masood was a true-blue ‘Brit’ (not white, though) who grew up in picturesque County Kent, just south of London. Typically, he clearly led a ‘down-and-out’ life seemingly ending with enough of a sense of desperation about his destiny to embrace Islamist nihilism.
He spent time ‘teaching’ in Saudi Arabia, a country that his own country, the UK, has long embraced as a staunch friend of the West. It is highly likely that, in addition to teaching in the Kingdom, he also did some learning - about the ways of Islamist ‘heroism’ and the path to ‘heaven’. Indeed, it is possible that Islamist moles in the UK (home-grown, of course) pointed the economically struggling and probably demoralised Masood in the direction of Saudi Arabia.
If the Muslim travel ban now being touted in the US is genuinely a ‘preventive’ measure targeting countries that are sources of ‘terrorism’, then the UK, too, should be on the US exclusion list. How many other social delinquents in the UK and in western Europe later became Islamist ‘terrorists’?
As it is, the UK and many west European countries are now bracing themselves for the return by their own – once socially desperate – citizens who ‘migrated’ to the Islamist State forces and now face mounting defeat in the deserts of Iraq and Syria. This European security preparation itself reveals to the degree which these conventionally ‘non-suspect’ western countries are nurturing grounds for this scourge. But Donald Trump, for whom ‘Islamic Terror’ was his trumpet call in contesting the presidency, was too busy last week fighting his own House of Representatives – and his own party – to be distracted by the violence across the Atlantic. Indeed, the political defeat he suffered is humiliating for a man who thinks so much about himself.
President Trump on Friday announced the withdrawal of the much-awaited ‘Trump Care’ (dubbed by a sarcastic US news media) Bill in the face of hostility by a Congress dominated by his own (ostensible) political party. I say ‘ostensible’ because Trump has never been an active member of any political party and, at one time, seemed closer to policies of the Democratic Party. Indeed, during the campaign, many Republicans were keenly aware of their prospective candidate’s policy distance from their party’s platform.
The rejection of the ‘Trump Care’ Bill by enough Republican congresspersons to ensure a vote failure in the House is not merely a legislative failure on the part of the currently dominant Republican Party. It is also a moral victory for the Democratic Party and President Obama who are the joint authors of the Affordable Care Act that is now the target of Trump and the Republicans.
In the first place, the ‘Trump Care’ Bill was a joint effort between the White House and the current core leaders of the Republican party and, unlike the Democratic party with Obama Care, did not reflect a consensus within the Republican party. In fact, there is no consensus in the Republican Party over state-funded health care or for any welfare measures, for that matter.
And this malaise of a serious lack of internal policy consensus has resulted in both, Trump and the Republican leadership in publicly admitting last week that there would be no further attempt to repeal or replace Obama Care in the foreseeable future. For the Republican Party, the failure of ‘Trump Care 01’ (there could be more attempts later) must be seen as symptom of that larger problem of major policy disarray within the party.