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COMMENTARY
March 16, 2004
Rotten Europe
Three days after the worst terror attack in continental Europe since World War II Spain voted to capitulate. In compliance with the demands made in an Al Qaeda videotape the Socialist prime minister elect Jos? Luis Rodr?guez Zapatero announced yesterday that Spain would withdraw its 1 300 troops from Iraq -- unless of course the U.S. turns over the whole operation to the incompetent United Nations. We have seen the spectacle of nine million Spaniards demonstrating their grief in the streets their hands raised and painted white in a poignant gesture of mass surrender. This quotation to a New York Times correspondent in Madrid by "David" a 26-year-old window frame maker who would not give his surname tells the whole story. He explained why at the last minute he had changed his vote from Popular to Socialist: "Maybe the Socialists will get our troops out of Iraq and Al Qaeda will forget about Spain so we will be less frightened." It should be juxtaposed with this quotation from Mark Steyn in Britain's Daily Telegraph: "So the choice for pluralist democracies is simple: You can join Bush in taking the war to the terrorists to their redoubts and sponsoring regimes. ... Or you can stick your head in the sand and paint a burqa on your butt. But they'll blow it up anyway." For Al Qaeda it is a huge victory after 30 months of continuous setbacks. They have tried a new tactic and it works. They have shown that by massacring large numbers of innocents on the eve of a Western election they may persuade the survivors to vote as they wish. Count on it: they will not now abandon this tactic. And they are likely to try it in the United States as well to defeat President Bush in November thanks to that Spanish capitulation. How often small symbols confirm the depth of a betrayal. In Spain's case one of the Moroccan terrorists of 3/11 has been revealed to be a member of the same cell that participated in the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. The Spanish Socialists exploited the shock and grief of last Thursday's murderous attacks on Madrid's transit rail system with demonstrations on the eve of the election. The outgoing government of Prime Minister Jos? Mar?a Aznar was accused of "lying to the Spanish people" by suggesting that the attack might have been mounted by the Basque ETA and thus have nothing to do with Iraq. In defiance of Spanish electoral law and disregarding the period of mourning that had been agreed by all parties the Socialist partisans shouted that the blood of Spain was on Aznar's hands. Let what it did stand to the eternal credit of Mr. Aznar's government. In the early morning of Sunday before the polls had yet opened and in the full knowledge of what the consequences might be to its electoral prospects it released information about the capture of Moroccan and Indian Jihadists and the receipt of the videotape that left no doubt about the authorship of the carnage. Analysis and homily must converge in what I have to say today. There is no ambiguity in what has happened in Spain. The rotten heart of Europe has been exposed. The best comparison one can make is to Europe in 1940 when the entire continent had capitulated to Nazism and fascism leaving Britain alone to fight. It thus came to be known as "Churchill's war" rather than "Hitler's war" only to revert when the Allies had won it and a generation of Europeans who had not lifted a finger decided retrospectively that they had been in the Resistance. The position of Tony Blair's government in Britain today is further undermined by the Spanish vote so that it is quite possible that the British too may soon abandon what the Europeans now choose to call "Bush's war" rather than "Osama's war". A good question might be asked of the Bush administration in light of the Spanish election. It was articulated by an American friend yesterday: "Before we waste another drop of blood trying to create democracies in the Middle East shouldn't we reflect a bit on how easily democracy in Spain was subverted by terrorists?" One must not under the present circumstances sound an uncertain trumpet. All men of goodwill regardless of nation are fighting the Jihadists in Afghanistan and Iraq as we fought the Nazis in Italy and France; and if the Americans must fight them alone so be it. Then as now we made a lot of blather about "democracy". But screw democracy we are fighting an enemy of civilization an embodiment of real evil. There is no compromise with such an enemy no capitulation to him no way to avoid casualties no easy way out. We defeat him or he defeats us. We do not retreat because our allies are cowards. We continue to fight for ourselves for our children and for the cowards' children. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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