>>The NYT had a piece on how one of the bombs was planted in a
neighborhood of fairly assimilated Arabs. Was the aim in part to
dissaude them from assimilation into British society? That's really a
question.<<
In relation to this question (and James' speculation that the Aldgate/Liverpool St bomb was aimed at the financial district), as a smallscale London public transport nerd, I can shed a bit of light on this one.
If you have two bombs with timers, and you put one on a westbound Circle Line train and one on an eastbound, then it is most likely that the westbound one will explode near Edgeware Road and the eastbound one will explode near Liverpool Street. Have a look at the famous Tube map:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/pdfdocs/colourmap.gif
Edgeware Road is where the Circle line meets the District Line and where the Hammersmith & City splits off from the Circle. The other end of the Hamersmith & City line splits off at Liverpool Street and Aldgate is the terminus of the Metropolitan line. Between Edgeware Road and Liverpool Street, Circle, H&C and Met line trains run on the same track.
Because the tracks are splitting up at Edgeware Road and Liverpool Street, these stations have much more and more complicated signalling systems and points than any others on the Northern half of the Circle Line. As any commuter will tell you, these stations are as slow as hell to get into and out of. The bombs went off here because they were on timers and these are the stations in which the trains spend most time.
In general, because of the delays that the Tube is always subject to, it would not be possible to target a bomb at a specific station with any degree of accuracy unless you were triggering it by hand. Also both the suggested targets are unlikely; people working in the financial sector would not be taking an eastbound train from Liverpool Street (as it just goes on from Liverpool St to random residential areas in the East End) and people who lived or worked in Edgeware Road would not be taking a westbound train there for the same reason. I think it's a more plausible theory that the bombs exploded where they did simply because they were set off by a small and poorly-resourced terrorist cell (possibly a cell of one person, though this relies on some fairly unlikely assumptions and is not consistent with all the bombs going off at the same time) trying to adopt a "Beau Geste" strategy of making it look like they had a much greater threat than they actually did.
I agree with James that this bombing doesn't have much to do with Blair and raq; the bombings to blame Blair for will be the ones happening in three or four years time, when the graduates of Jihadi University come home.
best dd
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