THE
ROVING EYE Al-Qaeda goes to the
polls By Pepe Escobar
It will
take a long time for Europe to digest the emotional and
political earthquake Spain has been through since
Europe's M-11 (for March 11, as the tragedy is now
enshrined).
A four-day whirlwind saw the worst
terror attack in modern European history; no fewer than
11 million people all over Spain rallying in the streets
against terrorism; a sort of "SMS (short message
service) revolution" calling for demonstrations against
the conservative Aznar government; successive al-Qaeda
claims of responsibility; and general elections with a
very high turnout (77.2 percent, including 2 million
new, young voters), which led to the conservatives being
evicted to the benefit of the socialists.
The
new Spanish prime minister will be Jose Luis Rodriguez
Zapatero, 43, a soft-spoken former law professor from
Leon, in the north of Castile. His priority will be "the
fight against terrorism", along with more progressive
social policies and, crucially, a new foreign policy.
Zapatero wants to "position Spain in the frontline of
European construction". This means, unlike the outgoing
Jose Maria Aznar, no more unconditional alignment with
George W Bush's preventive wars. This means, unlike
Aznar, very close cooperation with Europe's
Franco-German engine. And this means - following a key
campaign promise - no more 1,300 Spanish soldiers in
Iraq, unless the United Nations takes over military
operations before next July.
The conservatives
of the Popular Party (PP) were thrashed from the Basque
country to Galicia, from Catalonia to Andalusia. Most
Spanish political scientists agree it was less a vote
for the socialists than a referendum on Aznar and his
party, widely, graphically accused of "lying" to the
country by insisting on blaming Thursday's Madrid
terrorist bombings on the Basque separatists of ETA
(Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Liberty)
even when all the leads started pointing to the global
jihad. Waves of placards in Barcelona said it all: "Your
war. Our dead." By Sunday morning, polling time, in the
minds and spirits of most Spanish voters, the connection
was finally clear. Hyperterrorism had struck against
Europe. And average Spaniards had paid with their own
blood for their government's blind support for Bush's
war on Iraq - rejected by 94 percent of the population.
Under these circumstances, it's hard to
overestimate al-Qaeda. It's as if Osama bin Laden were a
deus ex machina thundering destruction orders out
of his cave somewhere in the Pakistan-Afghan tribal
areas. It's equally hard to underestimate al-Qaeda. For
some time now the global jihad has been a mutant virus.
The whole thing is smoothly evolving in terms of terror
franchising: small cells or groups organized around
Arab-Afghan operatives (jihad veterans who have been in
touch with the original al-Qaeda), and all of them
operating autonomously.
Nihilism and
politics It's a paradox that in its nihilistic
refusal of politics, in its tragic perversity, and
profiting from indefensible methods, the global jihad's
political strategy in Spain was nevertheless
meticulously calculated. The objective was to punish a
Western government aligned with the "crusaders Bush and
Blair" and their wars "against Afghanistan and Iraq" -
as Osama bin Laden himself had clearly warned in a tape
of last October.
The Madrid bombings were timed
for just three days before the general election. The
Aznar government fell into the trap and immediately
blamed ETA, without any evidence or investigation.
Already by Thursday night it was leaked that the Foreign
Ministry had ordered Spanish ambassadors around the
world to blame ETA. Then the global jihad started
unleashing its second artillery barrage: al-Qaeda and/or
affiliates started claiming authorship by e-mail and
video, as clues were progressively "dropped" around -
the van with the detonators and the Koran tape, the
dynamite backpack linked to a cellular phone. For its
part, ETA vehemently denied any involvement - twice. The
ruling Popular Party may have seen it coming by
Saturday, when a real "SMS revolution" - as the word in
Barcelona's streets goes - launched a series of
spontaneous political demonstrations against the
government's "lies" and "manipulation".
Even
before the demonstrations, Arnaldo Otegi, spokesman for
the Basque independent left and former leader of
Batasuna - the political party outlawed by Aznar because
of its links with ETA - was adamant: "A leftist
organization like ETA could never have planned such an
undescribable massacre of honest workers, especially
because it happened in a suburb that was a resistant
focus against [Francisco] Franco's regime ... ETA always
took responsibility for its actions, and it never lied."
By Saturday night, what Otegi seemed to know since
Thursday afternoon was evident to millions of Spaniards,
and there was even an allusion to it in the El Pais
daily: since the early hours, the Aznar government and
the Spanish special services knew ETA was not in the
picture. Any realpolitik analyst would add that
by this time no government could possibly not recognize
that the 200 dead and more than 1,500 wounded in Madrid
were the price to pay for a political choice regarding
the Iraq war.
Barcelona took to the streets in
force on Saturday - again displaying countless badges
and flags first used in February 2003, when the city was
in the frontline of the demonstrations against the
coming war on Iraq. Meanwhile, in the Basque country,
solidarity with the victims in Madrid soon merged with
deep anger. "To see the word 'Basque' assimilated to
this barbaric act, this creates a shock beyond anyone's
ideology. We defend our identity and our culture, but no
one is ready to pay such a price," said Panpi Dirassar,
a spokesman for Batasuna. The crowds in Bilbao were
furious that "the Basques had become the new Jews of
this century".
The Aznar strategy totally
backfired. According to numerous polls, as many as 70
percent of Spaniards consider Aznar, Bush's and Tony
Blair's "third man in the photo", an "arrogant and
intolerant" character. During his second term (2000-04),
he personalized authoritarian, centralized Castile
almost to cartoonish proportions, fighting against
Basque and Catalan nationalism (no wonder both regions
voted massively against the PP).
But Aznar is a
very ambitious man. As a sort of surrogate son of
Margaret Thatcher, he is detested in Brussels, but
anyway wants to engage himself in the battle of ideas on
a global scale, by persuading Europeans to follow the US
model. If his friend George W Bush is re-elected, he
will certainly get some sort of reward in the limelight
from Washington.
The Moroccan trail The investigation on the Madrid bombings seems to be
pointing to a Moroccan trail. Notorious Spanish Judge
Baltasar Garzon has all but proved that "al-Qaeda's
Spanish cell" was key in developing the attacks of
September 11, 2001. Of the three Moroccans and two
Indians already in custody in Madrid, Mohamed Chaui, a
native of Tangier, has his name linked to a conversation
involving Barakat Yarkas, considered to be in charge of
al-Qaeda's Spanish cell. On the other hand, no European
intelligence service has been able so far to identify
Abu Dujan al-Afghani, the man speaking Arabic with a
Moroccan accent who appears in a purported al-Qaeda
video claiming responsibility for the bombings.
The five simultaneous bombings in Casablanca
last May were conducted by Moroccan kamikazes recruited
in the suburb of Sidi Moumen. The authors of the
Istanbul bombings in November were Kurdish Islamists,
recruited by Arab-Afghans. Experts from a special
European anti-terrorist cell in Brussels confirm to Asia
Times Online the modus operandi of these attacks: a mix
of extreme sophistication and amateurism (just like the
Madrid bombings, when a cell phone, for instance, is
abandoned but still charged with its SIM card). These
operations are virtually autonomous - developed after a
fleeting contact with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or
Pakistan in which local groups discuss the ways local
jihad can contribute to global jihad.
Only one
day before M-11, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
had finished the simulation of an Islamist attack
against a Dutch chemical plant, leaving 200 dead. But
what really happened the day after was even more
unprecedented: the global jihad directly influencing the
outcome of a general election in a Western democracy.
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