Angry in the Great White North

Some things to consider.

If the forces were in London, I doubt they could have prevented this. But who knows?

If the forces were in London, the number of dead and injured would not have been different. But who knows?

But if it weren't for the avowed violent protests in Scotland and the shift of forces north, the idea to attack London might not have occurred to Al Qaeda in the first place!

And don't be naive, the anarchists are not satisfied with a march. They want trouble, and they were calling for trouble for quite some time:

The Peoples' Global Action Conference in Europe, is calling for a global day of action on Wednesday 6th July 2005 - the opening day of the G8 Summit (to be held at Gleneagles in Perthshire, Scotland). This is a call for people to converge in Scotland to disrupt the conference, and for action to be taken simultaneously in villages, towns and cities world-wide.

Alongside co-ordinated actions this is also a call for groups and movements everywhere to learn from our history and our successes; a call to assess our current strengths; a call to debate and strategise; a call to formulate a global resistance to the heads of the world's most powerful states meeting in Europe next year.

Al Qaeda terrorists can read just as well as you and me. And they can read about the shift of attention to the north:

ONE of Scotland's most senior police officers warned yesterday in the run-up to G8 that he was prepared for violence on the scale of that seen in Genoa four years ago, and added that police intended to crack down hard on anyone looking for trouble.

Peter Wilson, the chief constable of the Fife force, said it would be reasonable to expect and to prepare for violence on a par with that which saw running battles between police and protesters in the Italian city in 2001.

He was speaking as police unveiled the operations room from which they will co-ordinate the movement of the 10,600 officers - more than 6,000 drafted in from English and Welsh forces - who will be on duty during the G8 summit in Gleneagles.

Among the equipment which Scottish police have borrowed for the occasion are two helicopters for Tayside Police, fitted with state-of-the-art equipment to monitor the situation on the ground.

Now if I was a terrorist looking to make a splash, and knowng when the G8 summit was coming, and knowing that the anarchist heathens are already promising to stage violent protests, and knowing that the police would shift men and equipment away from London to deal with it, I would be a fool not to start planning an attack to slaughter innocent civilians.

But apparently some people think I am unfair to think that this happened, they think these two events are completely unrelated, and they think I'm some kind of neocon thug to suggest that violent pre-planned widely-announced anarchist protests are a dangerous distraction in this environment of global Islamic terrorism.

Maybe I am a neocon thug, but if the anarchists are shown to be aiding the terrorists, even inadvertantly, maybe it's high time to start a program of preemptively cracking down hard on the anarchists' illegal activities.