IT IS TOO EARLY to know for sure the provenance of yesterday’s explosions in London. The fact that they were eerie, undeadly replicas of the earlier attacks — blasts on three Tube trains and a bus on a Thursday in July — suggests either a seriously twisted mind at work, or a broader campaign by the nation’s enemies to destabilise and undermine our self-confidence.

But whoever was responsible, the attacks should — depressingly — remind us, if we needed it, that we are in the early stages of a long campaign. The notion of an extended war fought on our own turf, in our own cities, against our own innocents, has been, despite the IRA’s best efforts, a largely historical one for the British. But now we are slowly becoming aware that it is a modern reality.

On their side it will be fought by fanatical young men and women with explosives in their bags, bus tickets in their hands and martyrdom on their mind. One day they might, God forbid, get their hands on something more destructive. On our side it will be fought with intelligence, law enforcement and the kind of legislative changes that the Government is preparing to put to Parliament.

But we also know that this is much more than just a struggle between the institutions of our decent society and our enemies’ ambitions of martyrdom in a holy war. That the origins of our struggle — and in the end its resolution — lie far beyond our borders; and that the way to win it is to ensure that our foreign policy changes the conditions that give rise to the hatred manifested in acts of terrorism.

On this broad analysis, it seems, we can all agree. But on the details we in the West remain ruinously divided.

A concerted effort looks to be under way to convince a nervous British public that the victims of July 7 — and the intended victims of yesterday’s attacks — are the direct consequences of our own foreign policy. That, while we must do what we can to deter and deflect the murderous fanatics among us, we must also acknowledge that our decision to invade Iraq has made us a legitimate target in many eyes.

That was the common theme of a number of developments this week. First we had the Chatham House report accorded — inexplicably given the known views of most of the denizens of that hallowed edifice — much reverent attention. The Iraq war, it predictably concluded, had made us much more vulnerable to terrorism.

Then there was a poll in another newspaper that found that two thirds of the British people essentially agreed that our involvement in Iraq was at least partly responsible.

Finally, we had a report from an even less-reliable source — the infamous Iraq Body Count, whose impartiality was well challenged on these pages yesterday — that 25,000 civilians had died since the invasion of Iraq. Its timing fitted neatly into the general narrative that as we have sown in Fallujah so shall we reap in Tavistock Square.

The case has been made, on these pages and elsewhere, that the conclusion that many draw from all this — that we would not have been attacked if we had not attacked Iraq — is flawed. September 11 happened before the attempt to topple Saddam Hussein. The Spanish were targeted even after they had pulled their troops out.

But I want to do something slightly different. I will acknowledge that, yes, our engagement in Iraq has increased the risk that we will be attacked but that fact in no way instructs us to get out of Iraq or the Middle East. On the contrary it makes it more urgent than ever that we win there.

It is true in an obvious sense that Iraq has increased our vulnerability; al-Qaeda and its allies play the game of international politics quite well. Their aim is to divide countries between and within themselves, to prise the timorous away from the struggle. Of course that makes London a target; they know full well that many in Britain’s elites are only too willing — wittingly or otherwise — to respond positively to their demands But Iraq has, I concede, made us more vulnerable in another sense. Invading Iraq has undoubtedly created in the minds of many millions of Muslims the idea that their people, their faith is under attack.

The right way to tackle that view is not to indulge it, sympathise with it or nurse it, but to correct it. The right way to deal with anti-American and anti-British sentiment in the Muslim world is not to pull out our troops from Iraq and beg forgiveness, but to continue to fight there on behalf of the majority of good Muslims for the kind of country they need and deserve.

And we must continue to explain what we are doing — to take on directly the outrageous falsehood that this is a fight between Islam and its enemy, and to point out to Muslims in London, Leeds, Karachi and Kandahar just how false this is.

It would help, for instance, to point out that in 1991 we liberated Kuwait, a Muslim country, from Saddam Hussein and that, in the process, saved the holiest sites in Islam — in Saudi Arabia — from falling under his heel too. That in Bosnia we intervened (belatedly) to save Muslims from being massacred by Christians; that we did the same again in Kosovo a few years later. And also that we are striving to create a state for Palestinians.

Above all we should point out that what we are fighting in Iraq is not some brave, popular “insurgency” struggling to free the Arab people from Western and Zionist oppression, but a coalition of some of the most vile individuals who have ever crawled the earth and who happily slaughter Muslim, Christian and Jew alike for their own ends.

That is what we are fighting against in Iraq. If doing that has really increased our vulnerability to attack, it should make us even more determined to prevail.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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