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To: Lane3 who wrote (2204)	9/13/2001 6:07:46 PM
From: Poet	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 51706

Talk to us, Karen. We're friends here. please. I mean it. Or PM me.

To: Lane3 who wrote (2204)	9/13/2001 7:55:58 PM
From: Constant Reader	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 51706

I saw this in today's Washington Post. Did you? I remember it well. I think it has lessons for today. Iron (Lady) Resolve By Sebastian Mallaby Thursday, September 13, 2001; Page A31 At 2:54 a.m. on Oct. 12, 1984, a 20-pound bomb exploded in the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, where most of the British cabinet was lodged. The blast ripped part of the front wall off the building. It blew out the windows in the Napoleon suite, where Margaret Thatcher was staying, and the bathroom that she had been in just two minutes earlier was demolished. But the prime minister was undaunted. Less than an hour later, she appeared before the television cameras in her earrings. "Life must go on," she said. Four stories of rooms collapsed one on top of the other. Rescue workers searched for bodies in the rubble, eventually finding four people who died from their injuries and more than 30 who were hurt. Lord Gowrie, minister for the arts, dragged canvas deck chairs from the beach for use as makeshift stretchers. Others did their best to protect classified government documents. Sir Keith Joseph, the education secretary, emerged from the hotel in a silk bathrobe and sat on his official red document box. Four hours after the explosion, the searchers came upon a pair of naked feet protruding from the debris. These turned out to belong to Norman Tebbit, the famously combative trade minister. Tebbit was covered in blood and several of his ribs were broken. But he mustered the courage to tease one of his rescuers by barking at him, "Get off my bloody feet, Fred." At 9:30 the same morning, Thatcher appeared punctually at the Conservative Party conference that was being held in Brighton. Rather than enter through the back door, she strode through the front entrance, defying advice from the police force, which was braced for more attacks. The speech she later gave reiterated her message of the early morning. "All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail. It must be business as usual," she insisted. Just outside the conference center, firefighters suspended from ropes were still trying to rescue survivors in the hotel debris. But Thatcher proved she was serious about business-as-usual by delivering the speech she had been working on in the Napoleon suite at the time the bomb went off. She defended her government's policies on unemployment, the miners' strike and the nuclear balance. In the Guardian the next day, a usually critical commentator was reduced to wonderment. "Would it be silly to expect Mrs. Thatcher to modify her partisanship just because someone has tried to blow her up? Probably. She is a conviction politician and trying to blow her up is unlikely to make her less of one." After the bombing the Irish Republican Army called a radio station in Ireland to claim responsibility for the attack. "Today we were unlucky," said the caller. "But remember, we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always." The chilling asymmetry of terrorism drove the tabloid press into a frenzy; there were calls for revenge against the terrorists, and the right wing of Thatcher's Conservative Party declared further peace negotiations with the government of Ireland unacceptable. Thatcher was perfectly capable of responding to force with even more force, as she had proved when Argentina invaded the Falklands. But after the bomb she decided that business-as-usual was the most forceful response possible. She refused to alter her Irish policy one way or the other; a summit with her Irish counterpart was on the schedule, and she insisted that it go ahead. She was too tough to be frightened, but also too unflappable to retaliate hastily. She was the Iron Lady. The writer is a member of the editorial page staff. © 2001 The Washington Post Company