WHEN THE IMMEDIATE shock and grief at yesterday’s carnage subsides, a hard, almost callous, question will be on the lips of all those who seek to understand its true meaning.

Is this the best they can do?

It does not seek to minimise the tragedy that visited a normal, busy London morning. It does not devalue a single life, the emptiness of a single bereavement, the pain of a single mother, son or best friend whose life has been forever shadowed by a light extinguished.

It’s a truly important question, with geopolitical implications. It will be asked first by The Power of Nightmares crowd, the documentary film-makers and columnists and left-wing politicians who argue that the terrorist threat has been got up by right-wing ideologues in Washington and their pliant poodle in London.

At first, of course, yesterday’s events do not look good for the “al-Qaeda was all an invention” party. The bombings surely demonstrated, to those who doubted it, that there really are people out there with the motive and the capacity to inflict mass murder on the innocent.

But on deeper reflection, the conspiracy theorists will, quietly, claim a kind of vindication for their argument. They will say that for all the fear and terror inspired yesterday, the first and much anticipated attack on London in the post-September 11 era was a conventional and, by any standards, a rather limited business.

A few pounds of plastic explosive on the least impregnable parts of the London infrastructure. Dozens dead; horrific, of course; larger in scale than anything the city has seen before, but no different in kind. Is this really evidence of some new global terrorist threat? There was no ricin, no sarin, no smallpox, no nuclear detonation, no dirty bomb.

Not even the commandeering of aircraft for use as ballistic missiles. Just old-fashioned, 20th-century techniques in the service of 14th-century fanaticism.

Is this the best they can do? They’ll take the argument further, too. They’ll say that the terrorists wouldn’t even have been capable of this if we had not bolstered their cause by invading Iraq and producing thousands more martyrs for their cause. There was no threat before, they’ll say: if there is one now, it’s our own fault.

Somehow I think that most people, especially Londoners, will see through the emptiness of this argument. The idea that al-Qaeda was no threat until we created it does not stand the slightest scrutiny of events in the 1990s — from the first attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993, to the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and, of course, the September 11 atrocity a year later. And no one seriously thinks that only America was in their sights. The ideology of Islamism doesn’t stop at the superpower’s borders; its ambitions sweep through Europe; indeed that is where it is breeding so many of its jihadists.

The fight in Iraq is not, as the opponents claim, a self-inflicted wound, suddenly giving rise to new threats on our homeland from people we should have left well alone. We are, steadily, beating the terrorists in Iraq. Not only in the military operations, but also by demonstrating who and what the enemy really is. and thereby creating the only real long-term conditions for safety from Islamo-fascism — free states that do not deny the most basic human rights to their peoples. The people who murdered innocent Londoners yesterday are the same people who are murdering innocent Iraqis.

There’s another way in fact of looking at the question that offers a rather more optimistic perspective. Is this the best they can do? Is this what we have reduced them to? The damage to al-Qaeda wrought by four years of war is clearly impressive. The leadership is disconnected from its fanatical followers. The support infrastructure has been broken up. And yes, by fighting them in Iraq, side by side with Iraqi soldiers and police, we are showing too just how empty their death-loving cause is. We are still not safe from a much larger, more destructive attack than yesterday’s, but we are steadily eliminating the conditions that create the motivation.

There’s one more, rhetorical, sense in which the question is germane today. On Wednesday morning in Washington I watched TV coverage of the climax of the Olympic bid competition. I can’t, if I’m completely honest, say I felt that surge of pride that many of my fellow Londoners felt when they learnt of the success of the Olympic bid. On this one, I’m a confirmed member of the curmudgeon tendency, the cynics who regard with some suspicion the great, glorious celebration of a public-spending enterprise.

But, my goodness, through the sorrow, the pride welled up in me yesterday. Pride at the selflessness of emergency workers, blood donors, plain ordinary people eager to help. Pride at the matter-of-fact, dignified calm with which Londoners faced unexpected horror. And I’ll even admit to a little bit of pride for the first time ever in Ken Livingstone, whose remarks in Singapore managed to hit precisely the right tone.

But above all, I felt a surge of pride at the resilience and defiance of Londoners. They showed once again that fierce solidarity we have seen so many times when they have been tested; a determination to face down nihilistic terror and intimidation. What poured through the television screens yesterday was their will to elevate life over death, freedom over tyranny, love over hate. Nothing could better illustrate why our cause is right than what happened yesterday in Bloomsbury, the West End and the City.

United, tending to their dead and wounded, but looking out at the world beyond with a derisive snarl and a clenched fist, like one of those Low cartoons from the Second World War, belittling the designs of the enemy: Is this the best they can do?

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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