Former Education Secretary and traditionalist commentator Bill Bennett had been referring to what is now a pair of planned attacks on London commuters as the "Siege of London" until today, when he agreed to a caller's demand to stop. He should not have. The caller drew attention to respective definitions of the two words. The American Heritage Dictionary tells us a siege is "the surrounding and blockading of a city, town, or fortress by an army attempting to capture it," as opposed to an attack, or "to set upon with violent force" — again, American Heritage. Young men engaged in murderous immolation are attacking the British, the man warned, not besieging them.
Resigned, and probably half asleep at seven-fifteen in the morning, Bill Bennett conceded and broke to a commercial. Bennett's caller was thinking literally, and in the limited context of the bombings on July 7th and 14th, correctly. But what London faces is politically, strategically and philosophically none other than a siege.
Conceived shortly after men could organize fortifications around their armies and cities, besiegement is the military art of encircling, trapping, starving and breaking your opponent when his superior defenses prevent you from outright conquest. If you have ever watched a cat chase a mouse into a niche and sit patiently nearby for five hours until the rodent's hunger and impatience overwhelms self-preservation, forcing the mouse to leave shelter and die, you have witnessed a successful siege. In man's terms, this begins with cordoning your opponent's city or castle, burning the immediate countryside or stripping raw materials yourself, poisoning water sources and preventing third parties from resupplying or reinforcing the besieged. Since direct assault is impossible, you instead undermine a defender's walls, his health and his purpose. You catapult dead animals, quicklime and other projectiles into the garrison. Every action is bent to the purpose of convincing your opponent to fight on terms profitable only to you.
Franks on the First Crusade besieged the city of Antioch in October of 1097. Antioch was tactically impregnable, its impassive perimeter of wall and tower built by the Byzantines and recently captured by the Seljuk Turks. Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemund of Taranto and Raymond of Toulouse set camp and over eight months endured famine, sickness and battles with hostile armies as they waited for the Turks to surrender. Treachery brought the Crusader armies inside Antioch: Bohemund's spies persuaded a disaffected Armenian Christian named Firouz, who controlled one of Antioch's towers, to let a tiny Frankish party slip through the tower at night, enter the city and lay open the gate.
Britain, if stirred to the vigor of 1940 under Prime Minister Winston Churchill — called to total war against an unconscionable and ruthless enemy — could itself destroy the whole arc of Near East fascism, so that rulers in Cairo and Riyadh and Amman would gape as Tehran and Damascus fell to free men like Baghdad of 2003, before they left power opposite elections and reconstitution as sternly prescribed by Allied nations. But today's United Kingdom fights a discrete war centered in Afghanistan and Iraq, the democratist ends of which suffer persistent contention. Foreign Minister Jack Straw laughs with Iranian envoys instead of talking retaliation for the mullahs' terrorist war against his country's soldiers. The British ambassador, unlike his American counterpart, is still in Damascus. The British public lobs strong words at the London terrorists yet for years has reserved polite deference for authoritarian seditionists masquerading as Muslims next door. An intellectual coterie, whose relativist forebears silenced themselves at the sight of Blitzkrieg, keep calling for British contrition and appeasement, thumping their rewrite of the Bible in which it is written that Abel had it coming to him. This conflicted United Kingdom is the debilitative work of these elites, British citizens who murder their fellows the enemy's Firouz.
American character proves Islamofascists are nearsighted. September 11th cost terrorists Afghanistan and Iraq and Lebanon, the rest of the region pending as it leans liberal, and reforged George W. Bush as a man who now implores the free first half of the world to liberate the second. Britain's postmodern malaise shows where the enemy can get lucky and with a few dozen dead — or, better, simply the continual threat of a few dozen dead — convince the Kingdom that it is powerless. Even if terrorists remain aimless and inefficient, an obsequious Britain would be prostrated.
Yes, Bill Bennett is right to say that there is a siege of London. The year 1940 need not be revisited but this siege ends when the British ride out, in some greater semblance of a determined nation than at present, and destroy the enemy camp.