Why The Bombers Failed
IGNORANT of parking laws. And:
More important, though, the London bomb plot failed because open Western societies are more resilient than we sometimes think they are. One of the Piccadilly car bombs was discovered because an ambulance crew, responding to an unrelated call, saw smoke seeping from a car trunk and alerted the police. The other car was illegally parked, and London’s super-vigilant, much-hated traffic wardens towed it to a parking lot, where someone noticed that it smelled of gasoline and alerted the police.
That Britain has functional ambulance services and working traffic wardens, all of whom are civic-minded enough to call the police when they suspect something is amiss, may not sound extraordinary. But these are precisely the kinds of institutions that are missing in many places, among them Baghdad, a city where parking isn’t exactly a public preoccupation and where the civic-minded avoid the police, who are, fairly or unfairly, suspected of everything from ethnic cleansing to taking bribes.
Agreed. Although the traffic wardens did nothing out of a sense of civic duty, only out of a sense of reaching ticket targets and profiteering.
Traffic wardens: scourge of Western society and Islamicists…
Posted: 3rd, July 2007 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
