MADRID, 16 March 2004 — Now we know the result of Spain’s general election. But what cannot be known for certain is the impact on the result of one final intervention. Campaigning had been called off after the atrocity on Madrid’s trains that killed 200 commuters. But nobody could stop one last attempt to sway the voters — contained in the videotape retrieved by police on Saturday from a rubbish bin near the city’s biggest mosque, following a phone tip-off.

In Moroccan-accented Arabic, a man who identified himself as Abu Dujan Al-Afghani, “military spokesman of Al-Qaeda in Europe,” said, “We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid exactly two-and-a-half years after the attacks on New York and Washington...This is a response to the crimes that you have caused in the world, and specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there will be more, if God wills it...more and more blood will flow...”

Killing 200 innocent men, women and children and wounding 1,500 more may be an unconventional election gambit, but the cartoonist in the Spanish daily El Pais captured the way in which, during these horrendous days, the election choices in Spain have crystallized: Maximo drew a pondering, troubled voter poised over a ballot box, making up his mind not between the Popular Party and the Socialists, but between ETA and Al-Qaeda.

If, as the government initially claimed, ETA was to blame for the atrocity, it was likely that Jose Maria Aznar’s Popular Party would be the gainer, rewarded for the prime minister’s unrelenting hard line against the Basque terrorists.

But if, as now seems to be the case, it was an Islamist terror group that did it, Aznar’s party has some serious explaining to do. Without Spain’s involvement in Iraq — 1,300 soldiers committed, the fourth biggest national contingent — those 200 people would still be alive, those 1,500 would still be in one piece. The decision, in the teeth of the opposition of some 90 percent of Spaniards, to send forces to Iraq, will have backfired on the PP spectacularly. And at the most sensitive possible moment.

Small but angry protests outside the Madrid office of the PP on Saturday night gave a hint of the backlash that could be in store. The demonstrators denounced the government for suppressing vital information about who was to blame for Thursday’s terror.

It’s not clear whether the government did indeed keep try to keep information to itself, but, if they did, it didn’t work out: The cat is out of the bag. The five men arrested on Saturday, three Moroccans and two Spaniards of Indian descent, traced via a phone card that was found with a bomb left on one of the stricken trains that failed to explode, point as unambiguously as Al-Afghani to the true explanation.

Spanish electors, and there was a huge turnout, went to the polls on Sunday knowing that a vote for the PP meant a vote to stay in Iraq, and staying in Iraq meant, as the man on the videotape put it so bluntly, that “more and more blood will flow.” They could vote, therefore with the Churchillian rhetoric of Tony Blair — “We will match their determination with our own, we will be as resolute as they are fanatical, as strong in defense as they are hell-bent on evil.” Or, with Al-Afghani’s words ringing in their ears, they could decide that the position of Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatro has more wisdom than they perhaps previously admitted.

Zapatro repeated on Thursday what he has often said before: “On June 30 I will give the order for (Spanish troops in Iraq) to return home.”

Behind the cold-blooded butchery of Thursday, so apparently mindless in its random cruelty, some equally cold-blooded strategic thinking has clearly been at work. The fundamental demand of Osama Bin Laden ever since his emergence as a terrorist leader has always been for the West to get out of the Middle East.

From the perspective of George Bush and Tony Blair, the West has given a robust answer to those menaces, toppling first the Taleban and then Saddam Hussein, occupying Afghanistan and Iraq as well as inflicting serious damage to the Al-Qaeda network.