It’s a pretty ironic coda to the wingnut flypaper theory — under which we were supposed to “take the fight” to the terrorists in Iraq (and Afghanistan and Lebanon and, in time, Iran) so that we wouldn’t have to fight them in the streets of New York and London:
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Fran Townsend, the president’s homeland security adviser, said that the war in Iraq attracts terrorists “where we have a fighting military and a coalition that can take them on and not have the sort of civilian casualties that you saw in London.”
Either there are more than enough flies to go around or the flypaper has moved — or both. In his post, Juan Cole cited recent poll results showing that 13% of all British Muslims surveyed think last year’s London bombers are religious martyrs, while another 16% think their ends were justified even if their means weren’t. That’s almost 30% — of a population of 1.6 million.
Looking back on real and supposed terrorist attacks against the west, one begins to wonder whether we would have done just as well to invade England or Pakistan as Iraq, since the former seem to be where the terrorists are hanging out these days.