02 JUL 07 / "UK Terror"

Two terror plots in the United Kingdom last week fortunately failed to achieve their objective of killing hundreds of people, but they serve as a reminder that the war on terror will be long, difficult, and oftentimes tragic. In the first botched attack on Friday, two car bombs outside a popular nightclub in central London did not detonate. In the second on Saturday, a flaming Jeep was driven into a barricade at the Glasgow airport. Authorities conducting the preliminary investigations believe the two attempted attacks were linked.

Although little is yet known about the terrorists, the fact that they were unsuccessful leads to the conclusion that terrorists are beginning to operate in a more decentralized fashion. Al Qaeda sympathizers are splintering off and forming their own sub-organizations in Western countries. And since Osama bin Laden's abhorrent philosophy continues to infect Muslim communities around the world, terrorists today need not be directly associated with or trained by bin Laden in order to carry out his brand of terror. While we fight the central organizational structure of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we now have to be prepared to fight the improvising terrorists harder at home.

The recent targets in the United Kingdom should give us a clue to potential future targets. The UK terrorists are looking to exploit relatively soft targets. If properly detonated outside the popular Piccadilly nightclub that contained thousands of people, hundreds could have been killed due to the amount and placement of of the explosives.

The failed attacks may have been intended to mark Tony Blair's departure from the head of government, but they have also led to speculation that other attacks are imminent in the UK, Europe, and the United States, where many security experts believe the citizenry has become complacent. Soft targets number in the millions in the United States. 

Unlike the United States, the United Kingdom has large numbers of Muslim youth that are unassimilated and are being recruited and indoctrinated for acts of terror by contacts within Mosques. To ensure this does not happen in the United States, mosques where terrorists are known to receive support should be closely monitored.

Unless we can become more proactive rather than reactive, it's only a matter of time before similar small scale attacks are successful here in the United States. Leaders of anti-terror task forces should use their collective imagination to try to anticipate where terrorist will strike next. It would not be surprising to see a sustained attack over a period of days or weeks in which soft targets were struck. The cumulative affect of such attacks could equal that of 9/11.

Critics of the Bush administration's homeland security measures such as Congressman Dennis Kucinich say that civil liberties are being sacrificed, but they never cite a specific example where that is the case. While we fret over whether we are sacrificing rights for security, terrorists are possibly multiplying faster than authorities can surveil and arrest them. The Congress should strengthen programs like the Patriot Act, but with Democrats in the majority national security always takes a back seat. And the American people may pay a heavy price.