IN SCALE, IT WAS neither a 9/11 nor even a 3/11. Though grisly, brutal, and indiscriminate, the terror attack on London produced many fewer casualties than the assaults on New York four years ago or Madrid last year. On the gruesome slide rule of death Osama bin Laden and his cronies lovingly finger, London looks like a relative failure--fewer fatalities than in Bali in 2002, and well below the almost weekly outrages the terrorists visit on the people of Iraq.

The scale of the atrocity was not the only factor blunting its immediate effect. This must have been one of the most anticipated shocks in recent history. Since 9/11, and more urgently the invasion of Iraq two years ago, Londoners had been repeatedly reminded that they would almost certainly become the targets of an attack.

But if the measure is different, the meaning is the same. For Britain the bombings of 7/7 pose exactly the same test as 9/11 did for the United States and as 3/11 did for Spain. America, of course, passed that test. The response of the Bush administration began the long fight back against baleful Islamism. The Spanish, tragically and consequentially, failed the test. Indeed, Madrid still ranks as the largest defeat in the war on terrorism since the original attack on the World Trade Center.

The bargain struck between fanatics and civilized people in Spain was quick, brutal, and terrible. Terrorists murdered 191 in Madrid, and instructed the Spanish people to get out of Iraq now if they wanted

London, we all said at the time, would be different. When the inevitable happened to innocent Londoners, it would surely steel public opinion; even those skeptical about the Iraq war would surely not be cowed into submission like the Spanish. No one put this more eloquently last week than Donald Rumsfeld, in a powerful encomium to the British hours after the attacks:

"If terrorists thought they could intimidate the people of a great nation during today's attacks in London, they picked the wrong people and the wrong nation. History is filled with examples of tyrants, fascists, and terrorists intent on carrying out violence against the British people only to founder."

Some, however, did not share the confidence expressed in Rumsfeld's remarks. They wondered whether the British really are up to the challenge. The anaesthetized Britain of today is not Winston Churchill's Britain. Demoralized after a generation of indoctrination by the appeaseniks and moral-equivalence crowd who dominate the media and the universities, de-motivated by years of swiftly rising affluence, deracinated by the steady encroachment of European institutional jurisdiction, Britons might now lack the stomach to fight, and blame instead Tony Blair and George Bush for the evil that has befallen them.

So who's right? The immediate reaction to the atrocity last week has provided ammunition to both sides.