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COMMENTARY
March 13, 2004
Madrid
Imagine this. It is the morning of the U.S. presidential election Tuesday Nov. 2nd 2004. The polls have been open on the east coast for a couple of hours and are now opening in the west. There is an average turnout but the voting has just started. Breaking news: an explosion at a busy polling station in downtown Philadelphia. Within the next 15 minutes further explosions are reported -- in Brooklyn then Chicago then Miami then Detroit then Los Angeles. Dozens are dead in Phila possibly a hundred in LA. Several unexploded devices have been discovered including one in a small town in Kansas. In each case the damage appears to have been done as it was in Madrid Thursday by satchels packed with concentrated dynamite -- quite conventional explosives. But now there is rumour of a radiation hazard at the bomb site in Detroit. And now a truck bomb has exploded at the chaotic rescue scene in Chicago. This won't happen. It would be unlikely almost to the point of impossible for Al Qaeda and associates to contrive a multi-city strike in the present security environment of the U.S. especially after what just happened in Madrid. In order to keep secrecy terrorists must as in Madrid yesterday or on 9/11 limit participants in a hit to one extended cell. What made 9/11 "brilliant" was an extended cell of 20 hijackers in groups of five at four boarding locations; only one participant was waylaid. And that was possible only because the U.S. security agencies were fast asleep. Trying again to operate simultaneously from too many locations will get them nabbed. I am fairly certain the U.S. Homeland Security Dept. was already working on a series of election-eve and election-day terrorist scenarios for the U.S. The attacks in Spain were harder to anticipate despite the timely interception of a van laden with concentrated dynamite because the Spanish authorities are working within a mindset formed in response to decades of Basque ETA attacks -- almost always pointed assassinations instead of general massacres. The explosions in combination with recent airport terminal scares in London Paris and elsewhere have made Europe's security services as awake as they can possibly be to a new range of out-of-the-box possibilities. The chief alarm whether the perpetrators were Arabs or Basques or both is from the proximity of the terror strike to a national election. On the one hand the purely conventional means used by the terrorists to mangle Madrid' s commuter railways suggest that is the best they can do. For the time being radiological chemical and biological weapons are not in their arsenal. On the other the terrorists may be compensating for these limitations by attempting to set off political as opposed to material chain-reactions. The result of tomorrow's Spanish general election will thus be as interesting to Spain's enemies as to her friends. The retiring prime minister Jose Maria Aznar was under attack from the opposition Socialists for his tough uncompromising stance towards terrorism and his alliance with the U.S. and Britain over Iraq. How will the Spanish electorate respond? The way the Americans did to 9/11? Or will they instead reward the party of "moderate capitulation"? In other words can a terrorist strike scare people into seeking the easy way out? In its gloating message released through the London-based pro-Jihadist weekly Al Quds Al Arabi an Islamist propaganda cell promised further attacks on other U.S. allies -- Italy in particular. (Their demand for the return of Spain to Muslim rule was also reiterated.) The paper is wild and unreliable yet it repeats a message that is gradually penetrating all European society: that the choice really is between Bush and Osama. My guess is that Spain will vote for tough and that this Spanish defiance will communicate courage across the mainstream European political spectrum. But that is also my hope so the reader may discount it. We'll see tomorrow. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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