The people who organized the two further Istanbul bomb blasts yesterday certainly did George W. Bush a favor. Only hours before, he had told his British hosts in London that terrorism was the major issue facing the world. Then the savage thugs, who claimed to belong to Al-Qaeda, obliged him by proving him right.

The further devastation caused to Turkey’s second city is as counterproductive to any Islamic cause it may have had as it is wicked. It is the product of hatred, which makes men blind not simply to basic decency but to the realities of what they think they are trying to achieve. Have the planners of Al-Qaeda not considered how pointless their butchery of innocent people is? The inhabitants of British cities were subjected to devastating nightly German bombing raids during World War II, but they did not stop resisting the Germans. In time the German population was repaid tenfold for their aggression, with city after city being reduced to rubble in round-the-clock air raids, the massive devastation of which dwarfed the horror of the World Trade Center attacks. Yet the Germans carried on fighting — war production actually peaked in 1944 — until their armies were defeated in detail on the ground.

Terror acts such as these latest outrages achieve nothing save the venting of incoherent rage. Do these people imagine that they are winning any friends by their actions? Is the cause to which they lay claim being glorified by the mass murder of innocent shoppers in trendy Levent or the shattered bodies of the shoeshine boys who worked alongside the wall of the blasted British consulate?

These are the maddened acts of rabid lunatics. The only thing that will be achieved by these crimes is that the determination of the world to root out these savages and end their campaigns of slaughter will have deepened yesterday.

The Bush White House, which through its lack of subtlety and refusal to listen to its friends so quickly dissipated the worldwide goodwill that followed Sept. 11, will find international opinion reforming behind it. This will encourage the US administration to continue in its slavish support for Israel and condemn the Palestinians to further horrors, even though terrorists have used Palestine as a key excuse for their depravities. The US will if anything lean even harder on the whole of the Middle East.

The attack will also do little for the moderate government in Turkey, which is now almost certain to come under increasing pressure from the Turkish military. These guardians of Kemal Ataturk’s secular Turkish Republic have always been opposed to the rise of Muslim political influence. The fear must now be that the generals will seek to use the excuse of these Al-Qaeda atrocities to undermine the legitimate political role of avowedly Muslim politicians in the country.