Making Lists
Anne Zook is one of my favorite bloggers, so it pains me to have to cite her as the example of a trope which bugs me. She's not alone, though. I've noticed a fair number of people, when talking about the recent London attacks, citing it as the end of a string of attacks:"9/11, 3/11, 7/7" or some such variation linking al-Qaeda's New York/DC (2001), Madrid (2003) and London (2005) operations. That's fine, as far as it goes, though it seems a bit early to be doing this in the absence of actual proof of responsibility for the London attacks: one web posting does not constitute a substantial chain of evidence, no matter how plausible. Still, when I looked at Peevish, something clicked.
What's missing from the list are the other major al-Qaeda-linked terror attacks of the last few years. Initially, when I thought about the list and Anne Zook's missing items, I thought it was a matter of only seeing attacks targeting Westerners, but the Bali bombing (10/12/02) targetted Australians, and the Egyptian bombing (10/8/04) targetted Israelis: there's another commonality. To be fair, the Madrid and London attacks are decidedly more significant to US politics (though I was surprised at how little discussion the Egyptian bombing got in light of the presidential campaign's focus on terrorism), and London in particular is considerably closer to American experiences than most of the other sites. We notice what's closer to us. I heard about the London bombing first via an e-mail from my brother who's doing a post-doc there.
The missing attacks make a tidy string, actually, of one major attack per year since the big one. That's not a lot of data from which to draw conclusions, but it's certainly something: I note, for example, that with the exception of Madrid, where the timing was forced by an election, all the attacks took place in the latter half of the year, particularly in the July-October window. I note that they have alternated hotel attacks in majority muslim countries (2002, 2004) and transport attacks in Western nations (2001, 2003, 2005). I'm reasonably sure that the people whose job it is to study these things have noted these patterns and many more. The main point -- a minor one but shockingly relevant in this insta-comment age -- is that you can draw more substantial conclusions from more evidence.
UPDATE: Kevin Drum [hat tip: Kevin Drum] has a slightly different list, which I'll have to investigate further. Conclusions are only as good as the data you draw them from, and shooting from the hip only gets you so far....