E-Notes

The News From Spain: Terror Works

by Michael Radu

March 16, 2004

Michael Radu, Ph.D., is co-chairman of FPRI’s Center on Terrorism Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security. This essay is adapted from an earlier version that appeared on frontpagemagazine.com.

Spain’s March 14 election is bad news for the War on Terrorism. It suggests that terrorism, at the very least, can panic a democratic vote to appease it. The new socialist government, opposed to the war in Iraq, will be watched very carefully for its performance not only with ETA but the al-Qaeda and other Islamic terror cells known to be operating in the country.

A day before the March 11 bombings in Madrid that left 200 dead and over 1,000 wounded, with the general elections only days away, the ruling Partido Popular of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar was ahead in the polls by some 5 percent, and Aznar’s designated successor, tough former Interior Minister Mariano Rajoy, seemed a shoo-in to continue the eight years that party’s government. The party had a solid record of accomplishments. It had transformed what used to be a large backwater of Europe into the world’s eighth-largest economy and one of the fastest growing economies in an otherwise stagnant Europe. Spain came to be highly respected in Latin America and in the EU’s councils; and it dealt resounding defeats to the Basque terrorists of the Euzkadi Ta Azkatasuna (ETA). Aznar’s foreign policy was that of a true statesman-a rarity in today’s Europe. Against the overwhelming sentiments of the majority of his anti-American citizens, he strongly supported the United States in the war on terror, sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq at the cost of Spanish lives. His government was both active and effective in hunting down Islamist terror cells in Spanish territory.

By contrast, the opposition Basque politicians of the regional government, insufficiently pleased with enjoying the highest standards of living in Spain, pushed for total independence and took an ambiguous position vis-a-vis ETA’s legal fronts. Aznar’s main opposition, the PSOE (Socialist Workers’ Party ), in an attempt to ride the anti-American tide to success, opposed the war in Iraq while its Catalan branch’s allies engaged with the ETA.

Then the bombings took place, and a significant enough minority of Spaniards appeared to panic. Despite public disclaimers by the PSOE’s leader (and the country’s next prime minister), Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, despite the three-day national period of mourning and the declared suspension of the electoral campaign, PSOE operatives in Estremadura and elsewhere incited masses of party militants and clueless students to demonstrate against the government. Their slogans tell the whole story: “We want the truth before voting,” “Our dead, your war” and “The people do not believe the lies of the PP.”

The mendacity was extraordinary. “We want the truth before voting”— the bombings occurred on Thursday, and the government was rapidly pressing the investigation on. French, British, American, and Israeli help was requested and received; the Moroccan government, normally not on the most cooperative terms with Madrid, was cooperating; and arrests were being made. The government, naturally enough, was in the midst of dealing with a humanitarian disaster while openly informing the public of both main directions of investigation— the ETA and Islamic terrorists. No government could have done better or differently, and there were no “lies.”

The stupidity was no less striking. “Our dead, your war!” implies that Aznar’s participation in the war on terror and Saddam’s criminal regime was responsible for the deaths on Thursday. That assumes that the demonstrators knew better than the government who the perpetrators were, and that they were Islamists— an assumption based on flimsy evidence. While there are some indications that an Islamist group was behind the attacks, and indeed three Moroccans and two Indian Muslims have been arrested, nothing has yet been proven. The Al Qaeda-associated group that initially claimed responsibility for the bombings also claimed responsibility for last August’s New York-area power blackout, a patently false claim. At the same time, there are also strong indications that ETA could in fact have been behind the Madrid attacks, notwithstanding its denials.

Further, the slogan assumes that fighting terrorism necessarily produces terrorism, an argument that has been repeated in the U.S. by a number of war opponents who believe that removing Saddam angered Al Qaeda and incited it to violence. And the “your war” part of the slogan clearly means Aznar’s, and implicitly America’s, war. It places the blame not on Islamists but on those opposing them and demonstrates once again the intensity of the mindless anti-Americanism haunting Europe. Never mind that bin Laden has for years declared that he sees the Islamic “recovery” of Al Andalus (Muslim Spain and Portugal of the eighth to fifteenth centuries) as one of his goals. Are those clueless or ill-intentioned sloganeers suggesting that Aznar should have returned Spain to Muslim rule in order to prevent the Madrid attacks? This is defeatism of the basest kind.

The result of all this was that from being 5 percent ahead in polls on Wednesday, by Sunday the Popular Party lost the election, polling only 36 percent on Sunday 43 to the opposition’s 43 percent. Its support had dropped by 12 percent, which represents a large number of voters and raises questions about Spain’s directions.

The Socialist government may well prove very costly indeed to Spain’s future. To judge by its platform, the new leaders will replace a successful, market-oriented economic policy with the very kind of statist, socialist blunders that have brought stagnation to Germany, France, and Belgium. A consistent and tough line on Basque and Catalan separatism will, at best, be replaced by vacillation, inconsistency, and compromise. Spain’s economic growth will slow down and it will fall behind in competitiveness. And from being a staunch ally of the United States, Spain under Zapatero will join France, Belgium, and Germany in opposing Washington on issues ranging from the war on terror to Cuba to Iraq. Indeed, Zapatero already made it clear that he will withdraw the 1,300 Spanish troops from Iraq by June— unless, that is, he obtains the blessing of the United Nations.

In Europe, Aznar was a key member of the group trying to contain the ambitions of the Paris-Berlin axis; Zapatero will likely join or cheer it on. But the most important lesson to be learned from Spain is the most depressing and the one most likely to be assimilated by the terrorist networks the world over: in a Western democracy, terrorism, if massive enough, pays. If the so-far unproved suspicion that Islamists were behind the Madrid bombings, on a background of a Pavlovian anti-Americanism, was enough to turn 12 percent of Spanish voters against their own highly successful government, rather than against the actual mass murderers, what is there to prevent other terrorists from thinking that killing a few hundred Britons, Germans, or Italians will be equally successful in achieving their ends? If the Madrid bombers were Islamist (and even if not), the murder of 200 innocents advanced one of their strategic goals— intimidating the West and isolating the United States. If Spaniards are scared enough by terrorism to distance themselves from America, what could we expect from far weaker governments elsewhere?

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