WorldView: As a Londoner faced, yet again with news of another bombing in my home town I find myself asking, "Why do people keep bombing London? It's such a vibrant life -enhancing place, full of all types of people where you can sell and buy every kind of thing".
On reflection I see that it is this very vibrancy which is one of the reasons that cities like London get bombed. The creative energy of cities is abhorrent to those who seek the certainties of social cultural and ethical uniformity so they declare war on them.
Cities are essentially political and commercial entities. Their commercial dynamism brings all types of people into the citadel from all around, urbanising them and making them citizens who can then participate in public debate and decision-making about the direction of the city's development and their situation within it.
Terrorism and war, in contrast, present the failure of politics and are destructive of trade. Cities cannot easily endure in a world dominated by terror and war. One only has to think on the fate of Hiroshima, the partition of Berlin and the mayhem in Baghdad to see that this is the case.
Why is this so? Well, terrorism, such as the bombing in London yesterday, clearly is an assault on a city and on citizenship. It is an attack on civilians and on civility. It is an attack on an ethnically and culturally diverse community, an attack on cosmopolitanism, and as an attack on these fundamentals of modern Western existence, it is an attack on the Western world itself.
This much has been said by Tony Blair and by George Bush, but their comments are disingenuous, suggesting, as they do, that "we" are under attack from a hostile army of "anti-Western" killers and neglecting to mention that the kind of carnage faced by Londoners yesterday has happened many times before and on every occasion has been the work of Westerners themselves - from Hitler's Blitz to the anti-gay and anti-black bomber of Brixton and Soho a few years back.
They also neglect to mention that such carnage happens in the streets of Baghdad, Afghanistan and Palestine on a regular basis and often at the end of American or British weaponry. It is in this missing detail that we find another reason for yesterday's attack on London. It is the capital of the UK - a nation state whose government has committed forces to occupy Iraq and has been promised by Osama Bin Laden that for every Muslim they kill, al-Qaeda will "kill a Christian".
Here we see the third and perhaps most worrying reason why London is attacked. It is the ongoing balance of power between instigators of terror and those who regard themselves as the eradicators of terrorism that is putting the squeeze on the city's open-minded expressions of creativity and diversity, by building an anti-creative, anti-productive climate of fear.
It is debatable whether Blair, Bush and their advisers carry as much responsibility for the deaths of Londoners, as do those who instigate terror, but they carry equal responsibility for the damage done to civil society. In reinforcing the mythology of al-Qaeda as a unified force when it has long been clear that this "organisation" is more of a rag-bag alliance of disaffected groups, they act as PR men for Bin Laden and various terrorists exploiting grievances of violated and oppressed peoples.
The protagonists of terror and the warriors against terror have become locked in a strange dance of mutual definition and justification for their warfare which produces an ongoing, open-ended, un-bordered and debilitating condition of fear, and the bombing of London can be seen as part of this process.
Thursday's bombs were used to instil panic - in those present, which was relayed to London's denizens by instant and constant media coverage ensuring that the fear was felt by millions and people's responses exemplified how such fear leads to systemic breakdown in social and economic order - people were saying they are scared to get on the tube, people are being advised not to travel to work. So shops close, roads close, aircraft go empty, the bustle of public intercourse is replaced with private discussions held behind locked doors.
The terrorists know that this fear will endure if it's fed and they know too, that the root of fear is not the knowledge that London, or Madrid, or New York has been bombed, but the uncertainty produced by the knowledge that these or any city might be bombed at any time. So what will surely follow now is the tactic of intensifying and spreading fear by the issuing of false bomb warnings in the following days in order to protract the fear-ridden scenario for as long as possible.
When such scenarios endure, trust decays, mistrust grows into hostility to difference, the polity fractures, the economy suffers and the state, in its search for the shadowy enemy, lurches towards panoptic governance. All of this, of course, is the aim of the bombers. They desire to produce a fearful and self-damaging response by the British state and so increase their power relative to it. And this is very possible if the readiness of the British government to try to eradicate all possibility of terrorism by imposing legislative restrictions on civil liberties (the Anti-Terrorism Security and Crime Act 2001) and to impose standards for acceptable difference (such as the "British history test" for citizenship applicants) is anything to go by.
The danger is that the political judgment of British politicians may become overwhelmed by the desire to hunt out and completely destroy all agents of danger without and within society. Indeed, in places like London run through with cultural heterogeneity, this fear-driven quest for safety could become twisted into a drive for the security of sameness.
The potential cost of such a twist would be the loss of civil society itself. As visitors to US airports post 9/11 have discovered, overly fearful governments can lurch towards Orwellian surveillance and control, undermining the world they seek to preserve.
In such situations, citizens come to be seen as actual or potential enemies within, vigilantes prosper, civility withers and, ironically, the uncertainties and dangers that lurk within the society become its defining and potentially terminating features. Londoners, particularly those with Irish connections, have already experienced this squeeze.
The establishment of the "ring of steel" that followed IRA bombings of the City included serious monitoring of the citizenry's movements with a particular focus on Irish number plates and surnames. If British state agencies toughen up the already highly-developed surveillance currently in place, civil society will be choked and most significantly it will be choked off for Asian Londoners.
A new catchphrase is already commonplace: "Asians are the new Irish" and a reaction is already evident as many young Asian-Londoners, finding themselves pushed to choose between their British and Asian identity, choose the latter - some have even attempted to join up with al-Qaeda.
In this way the politics of fear instigated by terrorists but perpetuated by the governments of the US and the UK, fuels hostility to the Western cosmopolitan world within its own citadels and lays a fertile bed in which terrorists can lie low and gain strength before making their next destructive move.
Dr Chris Sparks was senior lecturer in politics and sociology at London Metropolitan University. He now lectures in politics at the Institute of Technology, Sligo.