Brits surrounded.(bombings and Jacques Chirac's comment on British cooking)

LONDON, JULY 12

IT was a history-besotted few days in London last week. The first big question was whether the Olympic Games in 2012 would be held there, or in Paris. London won that one in a squeaker, and the principals gathered for the G-8 meeting in Scotland sounded eager to address a matter that everyone seemed to care more about than world poverty, though that is a callous way to say it. Safer--and more accurate--to say that winning the Olympics bid generates locally much more satisfaction than increasing prospective calorie consumption in Africa.

Then almost immediately, as if designed to abort celebration, the bombings came. Four explosions in London, bringing pain to hundreds, death to more than 50, and a reintroduction, to a nation that has had so much of it, of life in the age of terrorism. The Brits seemed to take the developments in stride, one more chance to spit in the face of nettlesome intruders on the British way of life. But there is most adamant talk now of the need to regulate immigration. There are an estimated half million illegal residents here, and some of these get satisfaction from planting bombs in subways and buses.

But the most resonant explosions were brought on not by terrorists, but by Jacques Chirac. He was dining with German Chancellor Schroeder and Russian President Putin in the Russian city of Kaliningrad, which was celebrating its 750th anniversary. As Chirac chatted with them, he did not notice a French newspaper reporter at a nearby table pulling out a tape recorder. The reporter captured words which might have brought on a world war, and some British seemed to be almost in the mood for it.

The casus belli was what Chirac confided to his ...