The Pain in Spain
Dennis Boyles
National Review Online
March 12, 2004, 8:33 a.m.
It was, reported the BBC, "the most deadly terror attack in Europe since Pan-Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky by a bomb above the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988, and the worst in Spanish history." The BBC was wrong. It was much worse than that. Thursday morning's carefully planned bomb blasts in and around Madrid, killed nearly 200 people, and wounded some 1,400 others, all — as this headline in El Mundo put it — "merely because they were Spanish." The Spanish government, and many others, at first blamed the ETA, the Basque terrorists, for the attack. The ETA denied it, of course — and indeed in the course of the day, other clues emerged that seem to implicate al Qaeda. No matter who did it, it was Spain's 9/11 — or, as El Pais called it on the front page of their Thursday extra, "11-M" — March 11. (Elsewhere, Europe's press sinister was in disarray: Gérard Dupuy, writing in Libération, explained that the Madrid attack had moral collaboration from terrorists elsewhere, but worried that the bombings would cause even more people to flock to "antiterrorism's banner;" Germany's liberal Suddeutsche Zeitung offered only the hope the Spaniards wouldn't use "Spain's 9/11" to emulate Bush's "blind campaign" against terrorism.)
The tragedy took place just days after Spain intercepted ETA bombers en route to Madrid in a truck loaded with explosives, and just days before Spain's popular conservative prime minister, José María Aznar, was to leave office after promising to step down after two terms in office. Sunday's national election, in which Mariano Rajoy the new, somewhat uninteresting leader of Aznar's Popular party, faces the Socialists under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, will go ahead as scheduled, although campaigning has ceased. On Friday, millions of Spaniards are expected to gather for demonstrations of solidarity with the families of those killed or injured, and in opposition to terrorism.
Aznar was responsible for ending the Socialists'14-year grip on power. His subsequent success with Spain's economy, now the eighth-largest in the world; his stern denunciation of ETA, echoing the position taken by his predecessor; and his defense of Spanish interests in the face of French and German opposition meant the Socialists had almost no chance of winning the election before the blast. But the revelation that they had had illegal contacts with ETA, as reported last January in the Guardian, only added further injury to their campaign. The terror attack seems likely to bury them. Even in Bilbao, the capital of Basque country, tens of thousands turned out to stand in a silent rebuke of ETA. Although there is general support for regional institutions already in place — a local parliament and local police and the like — Sky News and the BBC both reported no signs of any support locally for the extremists of the ETA. One analyst remarked that the ETA, which once commanded some parochial sympathy, now has fewer than 300 followers these days.
The bombings came at the end of a week that seemed to be shaping up as Aznar's sweet farewell to Spain — and to his European nemeses. In a lengthy, two-part interview with Le Monde (here and here), the paper accused him of dividing Europe over Iraq and blocking the proposed EU constitution by insisting that the EU treaty signed in Nice, which gave Spain near-parity with France and Germany, be observed. Aznar told the paper that Spain had no intention of playing a supporting role to France's star turn, and that it might help the French to remember that "contrary to certain ideas, Europe's best interests do not lie in opposition to the United States" — a fairly exotic notion in downtown Paris, France.
As a solid ally of both Britain and America, Aznar has attracted the usual crowd of angry skeptics, each of them hoping the Spanish prime minister's insistence on supporting the war in Iraq might be his vulnerable spot. Public sentiment in Spain certainly wasn't on the side of the war, so it was assumed by the opposition that by focusing obsessively on the war, they might enjoy the kind of success that has eluded the British Conservative party, which is pursuing that very same strategy. In fact, the Socialists were so eager to pillory Aznar on Iraq, that they took a shot at Blair, too, just for drill. According to a report in the Daily Telegraph last January, one top-ranking Socialist thought he might win the hearts and minds of Spanish by calling Blair an "imbecile" — and worse — on TV. That clever ploy hasn't panned out so far.
It was unfortunate that Thursday was the day the IHT chose to unburden itself of anti-Aznar sentiments on its op-ed page. A very mysterious piece by Dan O'Brien claimed that Aznar's pro-American policies were bound to be rejected by his successors, no matter who won the election, because, as you know, the Spanish had lost the Spanish-American War, and because Aznar's pro-Americanism had "led to Spain's isolation in the EU" — by which O'Brien means, as you know, France and Germany. It's a point of view shared with Pravda, who made much the same point last year. Whatever. It's certainly not likely that Spain will be isolated in an expanded EU, where most nations will share Spain's reluctance to play the Franco-German con game.
On the same day appeared an impassioned item the paper called "Playing the Basque Card" by Jonathan Power. The IHT identified Power only as a "commentator on foreign affairs" — but he's more than that. He's also an associate at something called the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research. As a forward-looking, transnational pacifist, Power was angry that Aznar had not negotiated with the terrorists who had already taken 800 Spanish lives. "It is this absolutism, this arrogance of power," Power writes, "common to both the government and its predecessor, the Socialists of former Prime Minister Felipe González, that has helped make ETA the formidable and dangerous force it has become....Though the depth of bitterness and grievance among Basques might appear overdone to outsiders, it was enough to give the parties of independence 53 percent of the vote in 2001. This has to mean the solution lies in negotiation. Ireland reminds us that democrats do, sooner or later, talk to terrorists who have significant political support. In Spain it is time to talk."
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