Madrid
The banner is from this site, courtesy of a link from BoingBoing.net. New Yorkers had black ribbons after 9/11, but somehow this token had morphed into red-white-and-blue ribbons by the end of the month, which I’ve always thought of as slightly tacky, but, then, I live in New York, where the quality of shock was perhaps different.
And being in New York City, whose veins and arteries are the subway lines, there’s a particular sympathy and dread about Madrid 11-Mar. The Moscow subway bombing of last month should have evoked similar impressions, but Madrid hits closer to home, at least for me. (Though, somehow, the local news teasers for WNBC last night didn’t mention Madrid at all, but chittered on about some suspected burglers in Westchester. And I’m under the impression that the Today show, for example, glossed over the whole thing in 15 seconds.) Phil Carter has perhaps the best statement about this atrocity:
It’s becoming more clear by the day that the “war on terrorism” is really much larger than what even America conceives of it. Liberal society, broadly defined, is at war with the forces of terror which seek to undermine the global civil society that prizes such things as liberty, equality, interdependence, free trade, self-determination, human rights, education, and science. (This is essentially Paul Berman’s thesis from his brilliant book Terror and Liberalism) At times, the values of liberal society clash with each other, such as the clash between free trade and human rights. But ultimately, I believe our liberal (small “l”) society to be far better than the alternative, and to be the ideal that we all must strive for. Terrorism seeks to undermine this global order through fear and violence; it seeks to destroy liberal society in order to replace it with a far different vision of the world.
Whether you are Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, French or American, you are a target. We have all been victims of this terrorism in the last decade; we will continue to be targeted in the next. Our challenge is to face attacks such as the one today in Spain and to confront them with the appropriate tools of law, statecraft and war. But we must do more. We must also beat this enemy with our ideas. It is not America, capitalism or democracy per se that terrorism seeks to destroy — it is global civil society itself. To prevent that, we must make global civil society as strong and resolute as possible, and to make it good enough that it will ultimately beat the terrorist ideology in the marketplace of ideas. That is the challenge. The key terrain in the war on terrorism is not a mountain, cave, or even a place. Instead, this war’s key terrain is the mind of every global citizen, and it is that key terrain that we must seize with ideas in order to win the global war on terrorism.
As usual, WindsOfChange.net has a good roundup of what’s known at this time.
Addendum: Aznar’s Conservative Party has been voted out. This is disappointing, because, even if this electoral defeat had more to do with domestic political clumsiness on the part of the government — continuing to blame ETA even when it became more apparent that this was an Al Qaeda attack — the terror masters will still draw the conclusion that they toppled a democratic government through the use of catestrophic terrorism. We may see this tactic repeated before other European elections; the United States is also clearly not immune in late October this year. Would a raising of the terror alert level be perceived by Democrats as election-eve fear mongering by an Administration some of them consider as evil as Al Qaeda? Instapundit has a discussion on this.
Outside of the gnashing of teeth being displayed at Instapundit posting, it should be noted that the Spanish government’s support of American efforts in Iraq (note that Al Qaeda cares not a whiff about Iraq, beyond the positive in the toppling of a secular tyrant, and as a recruiting tool (though, conversely, the US Army gets a chance to kill the jihadis wholesale there)) should always have been regarded as fragile. Remember that 90% of the Spanish electorate opposed the war, and it would not have take much to revive this opposition. I tend to think that this is as much a failure of the Bush Administration to explain the war as anything else, be it undercurrents of anti-Americanism, a belief that appeasement is sufficient to deflect the anger of radical Islamists (despite Osama bin Laden’s mention of the loss of Andalusia in 1492 well before the war in Iraq, or, for that matter, the war in Afghanistan) or the international relations theory-speak of free riding American security efforts. Making so much of the case for war based on weapons of mass destruction has been a colossal error. Making the case that this was a war fought for liberal ends would have been far, far better. Or perhaps I’m misestimating how well believed this message would have been coming from the United States to Europe.
Oh, just to point out that attempts to bomb trains long predate the Iraq war, it should be noted that in 1997, a terrorist cell was broken up in Brooklyn. This cell plotted to bomb the Atlantic Avenue subway and LIRR station using five pipe bombs, possibly producing a catastrophy similar to what happened in Madrid. Clinton was still in office at the time, inspections were still ongoing in Iraq, and the Taliban had just declared an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan. That this plot did not come to pass was due to the luck of one of the conspirators having cold feet and telling the police.