'War on terror' suffers setback in
Spain By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- It was just last week, on the eve of one of the
bloodiest acts of terrorism in Europe's modern history,
that Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet
warned that the US administration's optimistic rhetoric
on winning the "war on terrorism" was premature.
Al-Qaeda has "infected others with its ideology,
which depicts the United States as Islam's greatest
foe", Tenet told lawmakers on Capitol Hill. "The steady
growth of Osama bin Laden's anti-American sentiment
through the wider Sunni extremist movement, and the
broad dissemination of al-Qaeda's destructive expertise,
ensure that a serious threat will remain for the
foreseeable future, with or without al-Qaeda in the
picture.
"Even so, as al-Qaeda reels from our
blows, other extremist groups within the movement it
influenced have become the next wave of terrorist
threat. Dozens of such groups exist," even in Europe,
Tenet noted.
Whether al-Qaeda was behind last
week's Madrid bombings or the perpetrators were part of
the "next wave", both the bombings and their electoral
impact - the defeat of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria
Aznar, one of US President George W Bush's few Western
allies in the war in Iraq - constitute serious blows to
the president and his anti-terror strategy, according to
analysts here.
Indeed, that the bombings took
place on the eve of operation "Mountain Storm", an
unprecedented US offensive coordinated with some 70,000
Pakistani troops in eastern Pakistan to hunt down bin
Laden once and for all, underlines the extent to which
the Bush administration's anti-terrorist strategy - in
essence diverted for 15 months by war in Iraq - might
have fallen behind the curve.
"The way the
administration has carried out its war, especially its
attack on Iraq, may have sown dragon's teeth," said one
government official who asked to not be identified. "The
fact that we and the Europeans had no clue this was
coming shows how little we know about the 'next wave'."
Hans Blix, the former hapless chief United
Nations weapons inspector, also suggested that Bush's
decision to take the "war on terrorism" to Iraq -
despite the lack of any documented operational links
between Baghdad and al-Qaeda or other Sunni extremist
groups - might have made things worse.
In an
interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Blix
said the war had "not put an end to terrorism in the
world ... on the contrary, the result of this
iron-fisted approach has been to give it a boost", said
the Swede, who is due in the United States in the coming
days for an extended tour to sell his new book,
Disarming Iraq.
That message also
appeared to be the one received by Spain's prime
minister-elect, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose
Socialist Party was expected to lose handily to Prime
Minister Aznar's Popular Party, at least until last
Thursday's bombings.
"The war in Iraq was a
disaster, the occupation of Iraq is a disaster,"
Rodriguez told a Spanish radio station on Monday,
suggesting that Bush and British Prime Minister Tony
Blair "engage in some self-criticism" over their
decision to invade Iraq.
"Wars such as those
which have occurred in Iraq only allow hatred, violence
and terror to proliferate," the new prime minister
declared, reaffirming his position that Spain will
continue to fight terrorism, but that its troops will
withdraw from Iraq on July 1 unless the UN Security
Council takes charge of the peacekeeping operation
there, something Bush has long opposed.
Though
Spain has deployed 1,300 troops to Iraq, slightly less
than 1 percent of the total number of foreign occupation
forces, it is the third-largest contingent from Western
Europe, after the United Kingdom and Italy.
Even
more important, Aznar, who was himself not running for
re-election, was considered among Bush's top foreign
allies, indeed second only to Blair, whose own political
popularity has plummeted in the wake of the Iraq war to
by far its lowest level in his seven-year tenure amid
charges that he and Bush deliberately exaggerated the
threat posed by Baghdad in the run-up to the war.
As a top US ally, Spain was slated to receive
benefits from its backing for the war and participation
in the occupation. Aznar was rewarded in part by the
Bush administration's decision to include Batasuna, a
radical Basque nationalist party linked to the armed ETA
(Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Liberty)
movement, on the State Department's list of
international terrorist groups. And last November, US
Chamber of Commerce president Thomas Donohue assured
Spanish business leaders they would get privileged
treatment in bidding for reconstruction projects in
Iraq.
But despite Aznar's prominence preceding
the US-led attack - he, Bush and Blair all captured the
global media spotlight at their joint "war summit" in
the Azores just days before the offensive was launched -
he never convinced more than a small minority of
Spaniards that it was a good idea. Public-opinion polls
showed that opposition to the war ran higher in Spain
than in almost every other European country except
Italy, at more than 80 percent.
Still, Aznar was
thought unlikely to suffer much politically, because of
the widespread belief that most Spanish voters were
unlikely to cast their vote based on foreign-policy
issues. And until the bombings occurred, public-opinion
polls appeared to bear out that belief.
The fact
that the bombings so clearly influenced the election's
final outcome came as a shock to some analysts, who said
the chain of events, including Rodriguez' pledge to
withdraw troops from Iraq, would undoubtedly encourage
similar strikes by Islamic militants in Western
countries.
"The most troubling thing about this
is the way the incoming Spanish government is sending a
message to terrorists that this may be a potential model
for them to affect policy and elections," said Lee
Feinstein, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, a centrist think-tank in Washington. "It's a
mistake to call for a withdrawal of troops, as if this
were a response to the attacks, because the Socialist
Party's opposition to the Iraq war is long-standing."
However, Feinstein predicted that the bombings
will likely result in much greater attention by the
European Union to the dangers of international
terrorism.
Neo-conservative Democrat and US
Senator Joe Lieberman said any withdrawal by Spain would
amount to appeasement, a position echoed by Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice.
"Anyone who thinks that if ...
a nation's troops stay out of a particular military
conflict that they'll be somehow protected from the
fanatical Islamic terrorists, is just wrong," Lieberman
said. "That's the same kind of logic that [late British
prime minister] Neville Chamberlain [used] in Munich to
try to pacify [Adolf] Hitler in the late 1930s, and
obviously that didn't work."
At the same time,
the Socialist victory in Spain is certain to strengthen
the positions of France and Germany, both of which
opposed the war in Iraq, inside the EU. Like Spain's
Socialists, the French and German governments fully
supported military action in Afghanistan and elsewhere
against al-Qaeda, but strongly opposed the war against
Iraq in the absence of any evidence that tied Baghdad to
the terrorist group.
