LONDON — Prime Minister Gordon Brown's first days in office have been a baptism by fire, with three soldiers killed Thursday in Iraq, two car bombings foiled Friday in London and a fiery attack Saturday on Scotland's Glasgow Airport. On Sunday, he warned the British public that they faced "a long-term threat" from Islamist militants.
Brown has indicated he will shift Britain away from his predecessor Tony Blair's whole-hearted support of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, but the attacks appear timed to push the government to move further and faster, and to deliver a message that the violence is directed at the policies, not the person.
"It was an obvious attempt to destabilize the government and to get the government to withdraw troops from Iraq," said Patrick Dunleavy a political analyst at the London School of Economics.
Previous plots have been focused on London, so the choice of Glasgow in particular reinforced the belief among officials and counter-terrorism experts that the attacks were designed to correspond with the ascension of Brown, a Scotsman.
The longtime finance minister, more accustomed to crunching numbers than confronting terrorism, responded with characteristic seriousness. He raised the national security alert to the highest level, "critical," and said security would be increased at airports and other crowded venues, vehicle searches would be stepped up and Britons would have to remain vigilant while still carrying on normal daily life.
"We're dealing with a long-term threat. It's not going to go away in the next few weeks or months. We have to fight it in a number of different ways -- militarily, by security, by police, by intelligence," he said in a nationally televised interview Sunday on BBC One. "We have got to also fight it as a battle of hearts and minds. We have got to separate, if you like, those great moderate members of our community from a few extremists who wish to practice both violence and inflict maximum loss of life in the interest of the perversion of their religion."
Brown's lengthy, cerebral responses distinguished him from Blair, who was known for his sound bites and emotive speeches. But analysts said it was a distinction lost on militants.
Paul Wilkinson, an anti-terrorism expert at St. Andrews University in Scotland, agreed that the attacks "came because of a change in government, a new prime minister and a new Cabinet. We know that Al Qaeda has followed political events and tried to use its terrorism as a weapon to send messages to new governments."
