September 11 was a wake-up call to the world, Tony Blair contended this week, adding that too much of the world had woken up for only a short time and had then gone back to sleep. In this country, the problem since July 7 has been rather different. The London bombings were another wake-up call. But the problem in the past three weeks is not that people have turned over and nodded off again. It is that too many of them, including at times Mr Blair himself, have served up their own well-marinaded preoccupations in reaction to the bombings. As a result, British society - as a whole and in many of its parts - is failing to come to terms with the unique and complex nature of the Islamist terror challenge.
This problem can be easily illustrated by the obsession in some quarters with trying to establish that the bombings can be explained by hostility to Mr Blair following the invasion of Iraq. Common sense says that this is probably partly true - since the Iraq war heightened Islamist feeling against this country - but that it is also far from the whole story. Yet this is only one of many incomplete and partial explanations being offered from different sides of the spectrum for the events that are now unfolding. Those who obsess about so-called "Islamo-fascism" without conceding the importance of the Iraq war and other perceived injustices against Muslims may be closer to explaining the dynamics of the terror, but they are just as selective in their own way as those who at times seem to depict the London bombers as the armed wing of the anti-war movement
When the July 7 bombings took place, the initial focus was on how Britain could have allowed the growth of "home-grown" Islamist terrorism - well brought-up lads who played cricket in the park on Sundays before heading off to kill and die on Thursday. Now, after the failed attacks of July 21, the focus has shifted again. Now the focus is not on home-grown but migrant Islamists, born and raised not here but in other nations and cultures, who are suspected of coming here to kill us. In the rightwing tabloids the life stories unearthed during the hunt for the July 21 suspects have become every bit as self-vindicating as the hard left's obsession with Iraq. They have revealed not just bombers but every inmate of the tabloid pandemonium - asylum seekers, petty criminals, muggers, pot smokers, benefit fraudsters, school troublemakers and lusters after blonde virgins. Every chocolate box favourite that any Daily Mail editor could desire has been brought together in one gift-wrapped self-validating assortment.
The point here is not to pretend that any of these issues - from the Iraq war to asylum seeking - is irrelevant to understanding the attacks that Britain now faces. Each of them is part of the story. But the larger point is that the bombings are part of a more complex set of factors that are not susceptible to simple solutions. US troop withdrawals from Iraq - which even Donald Rumsfeld appeared to be promoting yesterday - would not bring an end to suicide bombing. But nor would the Mail's daft idea yesterday that we would all sleep safely in our beds if only Britain were to withdraw from the European convention on human rights.
Mr Blair articulates a better awareness than most of the big picture, as well as of the complexity and interconnectedness of things. But he too has his big blind spots - Iraq and the rule of law among them. He was given a good lesson on the importance of the latter in his wife's admirable lecture on the role of judiciary yesterday. But until he, and we, can all better come to terms with the lessons of July 7 - that there are people in our midst who are trying to kill us and much larger numbers who approve and rationalise their wicked deeds - then we will waste too much time fighting old battles and may struggle to win this new one.