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."
Rotten Europe
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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, José Luis Rodríguez 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 José María 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.
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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".
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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 their children.
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David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen |
