The Telegraph in London is crystal clear about the meaning of Sunday's election in Spain: isolationism and appeasement on the ascendency. Will the Spanish Left not recognize that they are side-by-side with all other Westerners in the jihadists' crosshairs? We'll see.
The thumping defeat inflicted upon the Right-wing Popular Party in yesterday's Spanish elections was a blow for the war on terrorism. Jose Maria Aznar, the outgoing prime minister, took big risks to back the United States after September 11, and most especially to send troops to Iraq. Even his decision to take on his home-grown insurgency in the Basque country went against the grain of much elite opinion. He may well have mishandled last week's terrorist atrocities in Madrid. But whoever was responsible - whether al-Qaeda or ETA - will be pleased to have intervened so successfully in a democratic ballot. Spaniards died in industrial quantities, and the first instinct of many voters was to take it out on their government. If terrorism has succeeded there, where will be next?The election will be remembered as heralding the rise of ‘‘euro isolationism''. Large numbers of Spanish voters succumbed to the delusion that if Mr Aznar, had not lent support to the Anglo-American coalition, then their homeland would be safer. The credibility of the government was affected, as in this country, by the apparent failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This, in turn, impacted upon the public trust placed in their interpretation of who was responsible for last week's atrocities. It also appears that elements in the Spanish security forces were angered by what they considered to be their government's opportunism in initially blaming the more obviously unpopular target of Eta (rather than al-Qa'eda) and went over the heads of the Interior Ministry to speak to the opposition Socialists and to the press. They seem to have based their reasoning upon the need to alert Europe as a whole to the Islamist threat, but the effect appears to have been to hand victory for the Socialists who have taken a far less robust view of the war on terror.
Why do such wide swathes of Spanish - and, indeed, British opinion - take a "nothing to do with us, Guv'' view of international terrorism? Partly, it has been a failure of communication, not least of American public diplomacy. The European Left, no less than Islamist polemicists, has for years been besmirching the United States as the ‘‘Great Satan''; and, in the face of that, most American missions have for much of the time emitted little more than a pip-squeak. Above all, the Americans and sympathetic European governments have not managed to convey the idea that there is no policy shift which they might undertake that would appreciably alter Islamist behaviour. The idea abounds that if the West somehow withdrew from Iraq or transferred more wealth to the mases of the Maghreb that all of this would stop. De-ideologised, post-modern man is particularly bad at grasping the ideological nature of its foes. The fact that many Islamists believe in reversing the reconquista of the Iberian peninsula appears to have made little difference to millions of Spaniards. The desire not to take our enemies at face value, in word and deed, is the hallmark of much of contemporary Europe.
You can always find some, even many, with the view that we should not provoke the Islamic world and anything we do to protect ourselves from it will be provocative. Appeasement is nothing new and its futility seems lost in one of those great fogs that befuddle human minds.ACZ, Eta, Hezbollah and their many lookalikes have one thing in common. They all partake of the satanic nature of the terrorist culture. They inhabit a different moral universe from us. This is not the Satan of the Old Testament who under God's strict watch goes on earth to test the goodness of men. This Satan is the revelation of the New Testament, a Satan that is evil incarnate, who can seize men's souls and turn them into his subordinates on earth.
"What are the causes (of the Madrid bombing)?" James Naughtie asked Spain's Foreign Minister Ana Palacio on the Today programme, as if it were a perfectly rational question. Showing admirable restraint, Palacio merely replied: "Terrorism cannot claim any cause." Naughtie might as well have asked what the causes of evil are. Perhaps next time.
Whether it is the IRA, Chechens in a Moscow theatre, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the suicide bombers of Arafat's al Aqsa Martyrs, Hamas, Islamic Jihad or the now-defunct Irgun and Stern gangs, makes no difference. These groups deliberately target non-combatants, with the aim of killing and maiming them: they are terrorists. A bus mistakenly bombed by Nato in Serbia is not the same as a bus deliberately blown up in Jerusalem or a Shining Path car bomb in Lima. Such actions are not the tragic collateral damage of war but murder and damnation, even if the BBC won't say so. What astonishes is that the terrorist war against the West has been going on for more than 35 years now, and still the majority of Western countries are in denial.
By their own mad statements, the Islamists will not be content until all the lands they believe belong to the Muslim world are free of the infidel and the "humiliation of 80 years ago" is reversed, meaning the reversal of the end of the Ottoman Empire. Given their rather bloody interpretation of the command of the Koran to spread the word to all infidels, unless we pull ourselves together we shall find ourselves spread all over streets and railway lines. In the fight against Satan, it is traditional to have a deity onside. Let's pray by all means - and then pass the ammunition.
Mark Steyn is less metaphysical.
If Islamic terrorism were as rational as Irish or Basque terrorism, it would be easier. But Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, summed it up very pithily: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." You can be pro-America (Spain, Australia) or anti-America (France, Canada), but if you broke into the head cave in the Hindu Kush and checked out the hit list you'd be on it either way.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. Despite the sneers that terrorism is a phenomenon and you can't wage war against a phenomenon, in fact you can – as the Royal Navy did very successfully against the malign phenomena of an earlier age, piracy and slavery.
Or you can stick your head in the sand and paint a burqa on your butt. But they'll blow it up anyway.
Oh, and the Spanish aren't the only Westerners whose priorities are exactly backwards.
Posted by Alan at March 15, 2004 12:37 AM