Where Worlds Collide

In the aftermath of the atrocity in Spain, the usual suspects of Warbloggerdom are trotting out the predicatable stereotypes of ‘European appeasers’ and spouting garbage like “Welcome to the real world, Europe” (one of Tim Blair’s commenters). That last asinine quote reminds me of an obnoxious troll from Denmark immediately after 9/11 who had the same line in his .sig, except with “America” replacing “Europe”.

Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias is rather closer to the truth.

For the record, anyone who think this may be the incident that forces Europeans to get serious about terrorism is a moron.

Most Europeans were plenty serious about terrorism before this happened. So was the Democratic Party. It was George W. Bush who, along with José Maria Aznar, Tony Blair, and Silvio Berlusconi who decided that terrorism was such a serious problem that it should be pretty much ignored except insofar as it was a useful rhetorical prop for the selling of an unrelated war.

Unlike Stalinist twits such as George Galloway, I don’t think the overthrow of a vile a brutal dicatorship is a gross moral outrage. But I still believe it was a strategic and tactical mistake to invade Iraq the way we did. It may well be that we’d have had to deal with Saddam Hussein sooner or later, but the timing always seemed to me to be more driven by the American electoral timetable than anything else. And there are some very serious questions to be asked about apparent lack of though in planning for the aftermath. But maybe the Dr.Strangelove and Milo Minderbinder types in the Bush administration really did believe they could parachute in a bunch of exiles with no power base in the country and expect to smoothly start running things.

The biggest problem I have with the invasion of Iraq is the way it’s divided the west. When Bush’s administration doesn’t even have the confidence of half his own people, it’s hardly surprising that European leaders and peoples regard him with deep scepticism. With his parochial world-wiew he doesn’t seem remotely interested in the concerns of anyone outside his narrow domestic power base. But he still expects European leaders to put their own civilian populations in the firing line to support purely American policy goals that had little to do with the real threat we faced.

Almost 200 killed by a ten bombs on four commuter trains in Madrid. For us in Britain it seems awfully close to home. There’s a real feeling that is a matter of when rather than if we’ll see scenes much like these, only instead of the red and white RENFE commuter trains, the mangled coaches will wear the liveries of Stagecoach, Silverlink or First Great Eastern.

Was it really the Basque terrorists ETA, who still seem to be the prime suspects? Or does the scale of the carnage and co-ordinated attacks indicate the real culprits are Al-Queda? Or is it the nightmare scenario; some form of cooperation between the two. Or, as Ken MacLoed says:

It makes a practical difference, yes, but ETA has become so nihilistic and pointless it might as well be part of Al-Qaeda already.

The viscereal reaction is to wish bloody revenge on the people that did this. ETA, if it is indeed them, must certainly must be destroyed; there’s little evidence that they have any widespread support amongst the Basque people nowadays, it’s been reported that there are probably only about 250 active members. What’s frightening is that the Spanish government believed they’d got ETA on the run.

If it was Al Queda, that’s even more frightening.