If Al-Qaeda is behind last Thursday’s Madrid train bomb attacks, terrorists just overturned the conservative government of Spain, a powerful Western nation and Bush administration friend with 1,412 “boots on the ground” in Iraq. It only took a handful of bombs and the deaths of 200 to push 3,000 very angry Spaniards into the streets and many more into the voting booths. Spanish civilians put their own boots firmly on their own ground, and then voted with their feet. For Socialists.
Think about it.
Because something important has happened.
If it is Al-Qaeda, then Al-Qaeda has changed in very important ways.
For one thing, it is getting smarter.
Someone there is thinking just like a Pentagon general, only more so. Spain, a member of NATO, straddles major air, sea, and land routes, making it a key geographical defender of the West. Military scholars call Spain the “European Redoubt” — an almost invulnerable sanctuary from which air and sea attacks can be launched, and most significantly a place from where defeated NATO forces could regroup for counterattacks.
Despite decades of despotic rule by Franco, Spain finally agreed to full NATO participation in 1996, after years of national debate and misgivings. The West viewed Spain’s increasingly strong economy and high GNP as favorable augmentations of other strong military factors such as Spain’s high defense expenditures, high combat aircraft numbers, and its universal military training program that could potentially place more than a million soldiers into combat.
Significantly, Spain’s two enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla lie outside of NATO’s geographic application. Guess where they are — in Morocco where the new Al-Qaeda terrorist suspects reportedly hail from.
So while President Bush claims the War on Terrorism is universal, the “new” Al-Qaeda has given it a twist that is intensely personal to Spain. This has taken some thought on Al-Qaeda’s part.
If it is Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda is moving into politics. And they are not just changing Spanish politics, but the whole course and conduct of America’s war.
This cannot be good news for the West.
Spain’s Popular Party candidate, Mariano Rajoy, who’d been Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s handpicked successor, was expected to win election hands-down. Now, with the wreckage still being cleaned up and the dead not yet buried and the wounded still attended to, Spain’s conservatives are out.
Think about it. That is one powerful result from a couple of pounds of explosives and some very calculating thought.
If it is Al-Qaeda, they have rendered NATO a lot less strong than it was just a few days ago.
For Spaniards, voting choices were suddenly clear. Rajoy would have carried on Aznar’s unequivocal support for Bush’s war in Iraq. Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Socialist who won, had called for Spanish troops’ withdrawal from Iraq after seven Spanish secret service officers were ambushed and killed there. Zapatero drew attention when he pointedly sat down at last October’s Columbus Day parade when the American flag passed by. “It’s not my flag,” he shrugged.
And now, that flag won’t be leading Spanish troops in Iraq.
Spain’s Interior Minister Angel Acebes pondered whether Abu Dujan Al-Afgani, the mysterious, “Moroccan accented” Al-Qaeda spokesman, was “real.” No American or European intelligence service yet admits to ever hearing of him. But the reasons he gave for the bombings could not be plainer: “This is a response to the crimes that you caused in the world, and specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there will be more if God wills it,” the transcript alleges. “If you don’t stop your injustices, more blood will flow, and these attacks are very little compared with what may happen with what you call terrorism.”
If it is Al-Qaeda, it now regards itself as fighting a defensive war of national liberation.
The newly elected Zapateros has profound advice for the West: “You can’t organize a war with lies,” he said, referring to Bush’s failure to locate evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. While certainly not all Spaniards subscribe to Zapateros’s sentiments, no debate over whether Iraq is better off since Saddam’s removal erases the Iraq war’s dishonest premise.
But Zapateros won not because of his willingness to criticize America, but because of what he promised — independence and “full transparency” in government. These qualities are virtual hallmarks of genuine democracy. Democracy’s most elemental premise is that the people’s trust must underlie any good government. When that trust disappears, the people are empowered to change their government. Not through violent upheaval, but through the power of their votes.
If it is Al-Qaeda, we are not at war. We are instead playing a deadly, increasingly political game of chess. Al-Qaeda has just taken our rook... and without sacrificing their piece.
Think about it.
