If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us think insurgency won’t come to us? “If you bomb our cities,” Osama bin Laden said in one of his recentvideo tapes, “we will bomb yours.” There you go, as they say. It wascrystal clear Britain would be a target ever since Tony Blair decidedto join George Bush’s “war on terror” and his invasion of Iraq. We had,as they say, been warned. The G8 summit was obviously chosen, well inadvance, as Attack Day. And it’s no use MrBlair telling us yesterday that “they will never succeed in destroyingwhat we hold dear”. “They” are not trying to destroy “what we holddear”. They are trying to get public opinion to force Blair to withdrawfrom Iraq, from his alliance with the United States, and from hisadherence to Bush’s policies in the Middle East. The Spanish paid theprice for their support for Bush – and Spain’s subsequent retreat fromIraq proved that the Madrid bombings achieved their objectives – whilethe Australians were made to suffer in Bali.It is easy for Tony Blair to call yesterdays bombings “barbaric” – ofcourse they were – but what were the civilian deaths of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart bycluster bombs, the countless innocent Iraqis gunned down at Americanmilitary checkpoints? When they die, it is “collateral damage”; when”we” die, it is “barbaric terrorism”.If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us believe insurgencywon’t come to us? One thing is certain: if Tony Blair really believesthat by “fighting terrorism” in Iraq we could more efficiently protectBritain – fight them there rather than let them come here, as Bushconstantly says – this argument is no longer valid.To time these bombs with the G8 summit, when the world wasconcentrating on Britain, was not a stroke of genius. You don’t need aPhD to choose another Bush-Blair handshake to close down a capital citywith explosives and massacre more than 30 of its citizens. The G8summit was announced so far in advance as to give the bombers all thetime they needed to prepare.A co-ordinated system of attacks of the kind we saw yesterday wouldhave taken months to plan – to choose safe houses, prepare explosives,identify targets, ensure security, choose the bombers, the hour, theminute, to plan the communications (mobile phones are giveaways).Co-ordination and sophisticated planning – and the usual utterruthlessness with regard to the lives of the innocent – arecharacteristic of al-Qa’ida. And let us not use – as our televisioncolleagues did yesterday – “hallmarks”, a word identified with qualitysilver rather than base metal.And now let us reflect on the fact that yesterday, the opening of theG8, so critical a day, so bloody a day, represented a total failure ofour security services – the same intelligence “experts” who claim therewere weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there were none, but whoutterly failed to uncover a months-long plot to kill Londoners.Trains, planes, buses, cars, metros. Transportation appears to be thescience of al-Qa’ida’s dark arts. No one can search three millionLondon commuters every day. No one can stop every tourist. Some thoughtthe Eurostar might have been an al-Qa’ida target – be sure they havestudied it – but why go for prestige when your common or garden bus andTube train are there for the taking.And then come the Muslims of Britain, who have long been awaiting thisnightmare. Now every one of our Muslims becomes the “usual suspect”,the man or woman with brown eyes, the man with the beard, the woman inthe scarf, the boy with the worry beads, the girl who says she’s beenracially abused.I remember, crossing the Atlantic on 11 September 2001 – my planeturned round off Ireland when the US closed its airspace – how theaircraft purser and I toured the cabins to see if we could identify anysuspicious passengers. I found about a dozen, of course, totallyinnocent men who had brown eyes or long beards or who looked at me with”hostility”. And sure enough, in just a few seconds, Osama bin Ladenturned nice, liberal, friendly Robert into an anti-Arab racist.And this is part of the point of yesterday’s bombings: to divideBritish Muslims from British non-Muslims (let us not mention the nameChristians), to encourage the very kind of racism that Tony Blairclaims to resent.But here’s the problem. To go on pretending that Britain’s enemies wantto destroy “what we hold dear” encourages racism; what we areconfronting here is a specific, direct, centralised attack on London asa result of a “war on terror” which Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara haslocked us into. Just before the US presidential elections, Bin Ladenasked: “Why do we not attack Sweden?” Lucky Sweden. No Osama bin Laden there. And no Tony Blair.