We had meant to do this post ages ago and then the subject seemed to lapse, but it's now back again: the White House loves to quote extensively from Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in justifying their policies, but this is not the earliest vintage of terrorism that they cite favourably, although they may not know it. That honour belongs to the IRA.
Consider this line from a George Bush fundraiser in Alabama today; the line was repeated by Bush surrogates in the House of Representatives so it's clearly been distributed on the talking points as well:
We have to be right 100 percent of the time, and the enemy only has to be right once.
This usage and its variants came into currency after the Brighton Bomb of 1984:
The blast tore apart the Brighton Grand Hotel where members of the Cabinet have been staying for the Conservative party conference. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her husband Dennis narrowly escaped injury. The IRA has issued a statement claiming it had placed a 100lb bomb in the hotel.
The statement read: "Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once; you will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no war."
Incidentally, despite the potential seriousness of the Brighton bomb as a direct attack on the state, the UK did not see the need to weaken habeas corpus or the definition of torture, as Bush and Congress are now doing.
UPDATE: Relevant comments from Lord Falconer in an interview with the Washington Post, noting that by the 1980s, the UK had learned lessons from the 1970s approach to the IRA.
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