By Jennifer Nagorka, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – I had hoped that September 11th would be the last. After all, once you've proven that you can slaughter 3,000 defenseless people in a few hours, why would you need an encore? What would you do for an encore?
Now we know the answer: you keep killing. Since 9/11, Al Qaeda's bombs have murdered hundreds of civilians in Bali, Tunisia, and Turkey - and now Spain. The death toll from last week's explosions in Madrid is 201, with more than 1,600 injured. Just like the people killed in New York's Twin Towers, the Spanish victims were a mix of classes and ages and nationalities. They were average people on their way to work.
The Madrid bombings happened while I was shepherding a group of Europeans around Dallas. They were here for a few days on a public policy fellowship. Among them was a Spanish journalist from Barcelona. Watching her react to the Madrid massacre was like a replay of September 11th. She called friends and coworkers at home frequently, and then relayed developments to her traveling companions. Whenever we passed a television in a restaurant or bar that was tuned to CNN, she gravitated toward it. She felt out of sorts and useless because she couldn't report to her newspaper and work the way she would have had she been home. I remembered all that.
She predicted that Spain's conservative, pro-American government might fall if the bombings turned out to be the work of Islamic terrorists rather than domestic separatists. And she was right. Spain's previous ruling party mishandled the aftermath of the attacks and paid for it by losing in national elections three days later. It was a humiliating defeat.
Spaniards would have to be na ve or foolish to think that Al Qaeda wouldn't have attacked them if they had just stayed out of Iraq. Al Qaeda operatives killed hundreds of Tanzanians and Kenyans when they bombed the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. Islamic extremists killed dozens of innocent Turks and Indonesians with the bombings in Istanbul and Bali. No Western nation is safe, and no nation where there are Western businesses, consulates or tourists, is safe.
But there's a lesson for President Bush in the Spanish election, too. You need allies to win a war, and when your allies are democracies, being friends with the government in power isn't enough. You have to win over the people who elect that government, because they can always choose different leaders in the next election. This administration has been shamefully dismissive toward European public opinion, and those election results are an obvious rebuke.
The populations of almost all European nations strongly oppose the war in Iraq. They view it as an example of American belligerence. They also see it as tangential or even counterproductive to the fight against terrorism - and events seem to be proving them right. The security concerns - weapons of mass destruction, possible links to Al Qaeda - that the administration used to sell the Iraq invasion, were mirages. The war on terrorism is separate from the war on Iraq. President Bush needs to recognize that fact, or run the risk of further alienating our most natural allies in the battle against terrorism.
Jennifer Nagorka is a writer from Dallas.