Britain learns from Israel and Sri Lanka

Although expressing condolences for the family of the victim, Blair was shockingly tough in talking about the policy of shooting suspected suicide bombers:

“This is a tragedy. The Metropolitan Police accepts full responsibility for this. To the family I can only express my deep regrets…

I am very aware that minority communities are talking about a shoot-to-kill policy; It’s only a shoot-to-kill-in-order-to-protect policy. The only way to deal with this is to shoot to the head. There is no point in shooting at someone’s chest because that is where the bomb is likely to be.”

For a democratically-elected politician to be that honest is amazing. But it turns out that Britain has taken a page from Israel and Sri Lanka’s book in fighting terrorism, and although they’ve studied it “in theory” for years, only now are they turning their lessons into policy.

I remember studying Sri Lankan policy on suicide bombers, and the brutal realist outlook of those engaged in stopping terrorism was both appalling and refreshing. In one case, a policeman had three suspects who he knew—although he had no stand-up-in-court proof—had planted a bomb somewhere in a market. Without hesitation, he walked up to one of the suspects and shot him in the head, point-blank. The other two immediately confessed, and the police found half a dozen devices planted in a densely populated part of the city. They defused or detonated all of them without incident.

The Sri Lankan police officer interviewed by the PBS journalist made no bones about the incident. I’m working from memory, but the substance of what he said was: “I had to think of hundreds of lives. What was one suspect? That is the reality, and we cope with it as best we can.” Shouldn’t you have cleared the market instead? “The market was huge. People were everywhere. There was no time.”

What can we say about this type of terrorism policy? A suicide bomber can potentially kill dozens, even hundreds of people. The London subway and bus bombings could have been much worse. I can handle this stuff, but I’m a pessimistic realist. Is modern Western society willing to accept such tactics?

PLEASE NOTE: My mistake—the Blair in this article was Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, not Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.