On ABC’s Good Morning America this morning in a very brief interview the head of the Scotland Yard Anti-Terrorism Unit (née the Bomb Disposal Unit) said “The attack on July 7th was on a completely different scale than anything we’d dealt with before”. Their previous experience had been mostly with IRA terrorism.
That’s precisely the point I’ve made about European anti-terrorism generally (usually to the bitter denunciation of European commenters): the terrorism we’re facing now is on a completely different scale and the measures for dealing with it will necessarily be on a different scale as well. Previous experience with the IRA, Basque separatists, the Red Army Faction, and various other leftist terrorist groups will have only limited applicability.
