Smash hit

IN Downing Street, Tony Blair had called an early cabinet meeting as he had a busy day ahead with his visitor, President George W Bush. When the ministers sat down it was 9am in London and 11am in Istanbul.

At 9.20am, an official came in with a note. Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, hurried out. He came back with news that was still shocking for all that it had been so long predicted: Al-Qaeda had fulfilled its threats to spill British blood. It, or its affiliates, had successfuly struck at British targets abroad at the very moment when Bush was visiting the ally that had joined him in the invasion of Iraq.

Not only the British consulate had been attacked but also the Istanbul headquarters of HSBC, the British bank, where another huge explosion — the first boom of the morning — had wreaked similar death and devastation.
Bush heard the news before leaving Buckingham Palace to lay a wreath at the tomb of the unknown warrior in Westminster Abbey.

Throughout the hours ahead, as Blair and Bush adapted the long-planned choreography of the state visit to fit the sombre new mood — and as 70,000 of their opponents marched through central London branding them as war criminals — Britain gradually came to terms with the evidence that it really is in the frontline of the war on terror.
To Blair and Bush, this was vindication of their alliance. At a press conference, the prime minister vowed that the fight against global terrorism would not be derailed by "thugs or killers". For good measure, he added that terrorism would not force Britain out of Iraq.

To the demonstrators, however, the carnage in Istanbul was the fault of these two leaders. They were reaping the whirlwind they had sown by invading Iraq. To the British police and intelligence services — and the hordes of Secret Service, CIA and FBI officers who had flown across with the president — there was an emergency to be tackled and lessons to be learnt.

What was the immediate threat in Britain, where the security alert was only one notch below the highest rating? And what had gone wrong in Istanbul that such an obvious target as the consul general should have been working a few feet from a narrow street, for Al-Qaeda's suicide bombers to pick off? This was above all a Turkish calamity, however. Of the 30 dead, 27 are Turks. Furthermore, the suicide bombers were striking at a society that is a model for the American neo-conservative political prescription for the salvation of the Middle East: a functioning Islamic democracy. But it is one with economic, social and security problems that can only be exacerbated by terror.

Its history is evident in old Istanbul, where the 19th-
century British consulate jostled alongside beer halls, spice markets and discos, all squeezed close together in picturesque buildings from a bygone age. Once the heart of the Ottoman capital, today it attracts shoppers and tourists.
This part of town with its twisting streets is horribly vulnerable to bombers. Last weekend they attacked two synagogues, killing 23 people and injuring 146. Now police are sifting for body parts in the debris around the consulate.
The brutal lesson of Thursday is that Al-Qaeda can also strike at a very different kind of target. HSBC's new high-rise headquarters sits on a broad thoroughfare in Istanbul's main business district. Yet it was shattered by a car bomb thought to consist of 500lb of explosive.

The modern and elegant area around the HSBC building might be somewhere in western Europe or America — a fact that illustrates the misapprehension that some people in Britain may have of Turkey as a land of fanatical football hooligans, brutal soldiers, Kurdish terrorists and cheap holidays.

Although Istanbul is at the extreme edge of Europe, it is the continent's largest city and of course one of the oldest. For many of its 12m people, trying to live a modern European metropolitan lifestyle on incomes distinctly lower than those of western Europe, the bombings are the latest in a series of cruel jolts and economic setbacks.

In August 1999 an earthquake in a nearby province killed at least 17,000 people. In February 2001, mismanagement of the economy and rampant corruption triggered a headlong economic collapse which drove many comfortably off families temporarily below the poverty line. Many people fear that they now face more blows to their chances of a decent life.

On the fringes of Istanbul's society, groups of radicals dream of deflecting the country from the path to modernity. If they have now succeeded in scaring away international investors and triggering another economic downturn, they will have advanced their cause significantly.
Like Indonesia and Morocco, other recent Al-Qaeda targets, Turkey is one of a band of countries along the frontiers of the Islamic world where East and West overlap, making it relatively easy for terrorists to strike
at westerners and western targets using short lines of communication.

Turkish public opinion is every bit as implacable where terrorism is concerned as are the country's conservative military and political elites.They will give Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, pretty much a blank cheque to ensure security.

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