"Anarchy in the U.K.!"

It appears that Western Civilization dodged a large-caliber bullet last night. Only someone living in Osama’s old cave in Afghanistan hasn’t heard about the foiled UK bomb plot by now. Someone living with Osama would likely know all the details, but the involvement of Al Qaeda hasn’t been confirmed yet.

The magnitude of the plot leaves me slightly astounded, but I can’t say it surprised me. Since the affair is still under investigation, and developing rapidly, I only have a few random initial comments at this point; things that ran through what’s left of my mind since I started watching the non-stop coverage at 0230:

First, I hope this near-miss is another clue for those misguided souls who keep insisting we can negotiate with Islamofascism. If only we accede to the terrorists’ demands, we are told, they’ll get all warm and fuzzy and stop plotting to kill us. Wrong! They are both temporal and fanatical by nature, and are convinced they get their marching orders from God. That’s a deadly combination. They don’t care what we think, or want, or feel. Their thinking is best paraphrased by an old bumper sticker I don’t see much any more: “The [Koran] says it, I believe it, and that settles it!”

When I heard the circumspect detail that a liquid explosive is involved, I immediately thought “binary agent and a nucleation catalyst”. (For those not conversant in the language of mischief, that means “two harmless liquids that can be mixed together, and something that can be dropped into the mixture to make it go BANG!” Kind of like dropping Mentos into Diet Coke for that big fizz that occurs, but much more lethal.) I’m not going to print recipes from The Anarchist’s Cookbook here, but something like that can easily be done, and it saves the suicidal maniac from the embarrassment of having the other passengers stare at him while he fumbles with wires, a detonator, and a modified I-pod at 30,000 feet. People might not notice you pouring your eye drops into your mouthwash in mid-flight, but when you start hooking your cell phone up to the bottle, they might get a little suspicious.

I’m not trying to be overly cute here. I’m just affirming that two liquids and a tiny detonation catalyst is imminently do-able, quickly and virtually unnoticed. People strolling to the washroom with their toiletries kits are a frequent sight on trans-Atlantic flights. The airlines are more concerned about you sneaking a cigarette in there than they are about you mixing your “eye drops” into your “mouthwash”. (Granted, that seems to have changed since yesterday.)

The title of this post is also the title of an old song by Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols. It started playing in my head early this morning, and like the voices I hear when I wear my tinfoil hat, it hasn’t let up yet. Thanks to M.I.5, the London police, the CIA, and others, anarchy seems to have been avoided in Britain today. Watching the ongoing coverage of delays and cancelled flights, I have to wonder what the impact on the airline industry and the economic ripple effect will be. Even in failure, the terrorists may have made a big score.

And finally, sleeplessness and too much caffeine led to one last speculation: How long will it be before the moonbats on The Loony Left start yowling that this is another sinister plot—contrived by George Bush with the collaboration of his “lapdog” Tony—to divert world sympathy away from the Hezbollah/Iranian terrorists during the Middle East war du jour? I don’t think Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy could come up with something that elegant, but it’s no more outlandish than college professors and unemployed Congresswomen running around saying we attacked ourselves on 9/11. At any minute, I expect Those People to start their usual hue and cry about the increased security measures stealing our civil liberties.

Speaking of unemployed Congresswomen, as a fellow Georgian I have four words for Cynthia McKinney: Goodbye, and good riddance!