War on terror will be won in the end
RICHARD GWYN
That the terrorists should have struck in Madrid just a few days before elections were due to be held in Spain was no coincidence.
If those responsible were ETA, the local Basque separatist organization, then their objective was to stage a protest against an election of which one consequence will be to confirm how little support these separatists have.
If the deed was done, instead, by Al Qaeda, then its purpose was to take advantage of the fact that the local police and government agencies would have been distracted from their surveillance by the work they had to do stage the election.
In either instance, there is a symbolic significance to the timing of the massacre.
Elections, public campaigning, the ordinary ebb and flow of politics with issues and policies being discussed — and at least as much, personalities being discussed — and with public debates taking place, sometimes substantive, often confused or muddled or heated or emotional, are all the deadliest possible opponents to terrorists.
The terrorists worry about the police and the intelligence services of course. But what they fear most is democracy.
It is, as Winston Churchill famously said, the worst of all possible systems of governance, except for all the others.
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