Frankly, it's a bad day to be a blogger. The London attacks understandably cause a visceral reaction, and blogging, which rewards the ability to make strong, ideologically-extreme statements, as well as the ability to do so quickly, generates all heat on a day like this, and almost no light. We really don't know shit about what happened, who did it, and how it managed to occur, so any finger-pointing at this stage isn't merely ridiculous, it's cancerous.

As others have taken their predictably partisan stances, and used the deaths of the innocent to reaffirm their earlier position on U.S. military involvement in Iraq, I thinks it's fair to point out that in terms of preventing attacks, such as the ones today and on 9/11, our current war in the Middle East is worthlessly irrelevant. Having a democratic government in Iraq will not stop terrorism. Detaining any suspicious-looking Arab emigre will not stop terrorism. Passing the Patriot Act has not made us any safer than we would have been if we had done nothing at all, nor will the extension of certain provisions make future attacks less certain; Great Britain, for example, has even more onerous laws to that effect, but, at least today, they were to no avail.

Typically, Josh Marshall makes the most sense on this issue:

Beside the threat we face from the bacillus of Islamic terror, President Bush has created a great running wound on the whole country in the form of the mess he's created in Iraq -- a wound bleeding blood, treasure and a scourge of national division which is now impossible to ignore but which we can ill-afford. Even now his cheerleaders are trying to enlist this outrage in the battle to prop up their folly in Iraq. If anything our folly in Iraq has made the immediacy and intensity of this basic threat worse. But let's not be blinded by our outrage at that folly or distracted from thinking concretely, together and resolutely, how we defend our innocents from such religious fanaticism and the violence it spawns.

What we need is some acknowledgment of good faith on the issue of fighting terrorism, what it will entail, how best to go about the task, and not score-settling, or worse, demagoguery that focuses the blame on people other than the thugs who planted the bombs.

UPDATE: For an amazing example of the good the web can do on a day like this, check out the Wikipedia page on today's tragedy. [link via Hit & Run] Also, there has been amazing coverage from bloggers on the scene in London that puts the armchair punditry of the rest of the blogosphere to shame.