Will Germany "Get It?"

A colleague tells me of a friend who was at the Hamburg train station during a recent bomb scare. Passengers, evacuated from the suspect train, were quite upset--about the delay. No one took the threat seriously. I confess to my own mundane thoughts in a similar situation. I was at the Zurich airport last month departing for London when the news came that flights to Britain were cancelled because the Brits had thwarted a major terrorist plot. My first thought was, How in the world will I ever get my checked suitcase back?

This summer's thwarted plot to blow up two trains in Germany has started a long overdue debate here about the nature of the terrorist threat. Until now the conventional wisdom has been that Germany was immune from Islamic terrorism because Gerhard Schröder kept the country out of the Iraq war. Britain was attacked because Tony Blair is a poodle of the Americans. Spain suffered attacks because José María Aznar helped remove Saddam Hussein from power. This is all nonsense, of course. The Canadians uncovered a plot this summer in which terrorists sought to attack the parliament and behead the prime minister. Canada was against the Iraq invasion. Al Qaeda has murdered innocents in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, which opposed the Iraq war.

Read the rest of Jeffrey Gedmin’s article here.