WOW. This sounds too much like Kerry, only much worse. Christopher Caldwell at The Weekly Standard explains how 9/11 has altered Spain and Europe generally: a shroud of contradictory denial has seized people there. --Orson --------------------------------------------- [snip!] So it is only with reference to what [the new Prime Minister] Zapatero calls his "European vision" of Spanish foreign policy that one can understand the nomination of Miguel Angel Moratinos--who has spent the last eight years in Ramallah unsuccessfully trying to win a role for the European Union in the Middle East peace process--as his foreign minister. One could see the difference of approach on April 15, when an audiotape from Osama bin Laden offered a separate peace to those European countries that withdrew solidarity from the United States. While most news sources--and certainly all European ones--portrayed the European response as a univocal rebuff to bin Laden, there were differences in tone that one could pick up by contrasting Moratinos's remarks with those of Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini. What Frattini said was, "It's unthinkable that we open a negotiation with bin Laden. Everybody understands this." Moratinos said: "What we want is peace, democracy, and freedom. We don't have to listen to or answer it." On an early visit to Washington, Moratinos said that, in the war on terror, he would send troops wherever the U.N. decides. Indeed, the troops Spain plans to send to Afghanistan to augment the 200 it already has there will go under U.N., not NATO, auspices. Never did he cite March 11 to assert Spain's right to self-defense under the U.N. charter, perhaps out of obedience to the strange reverse-Machiavellianism of European strategic thinking, which wields a double standard against itself. From the moment the bombs went off in Madrid, the statements one heard from Zapatero's circle were illogical: On the one hand, Iraq was so disconnected from al Qaeda that Spain's entry into the Iraq war was unjustified. On the other hand, Iraq was so tightly linked to al Qaeda that the March 11 bombings were just tit for tat. This pair of irreconcilable views is widely held. According to one Aznar adviser, a few days after the March 11 bombings, some of the three dozen men arrested for the attacks brought to the neighborhood of Lavapiés where the attacks had been organized. It was not a perp walk--the goal was to get the terrorists in situ to answer investigators' questions. But the authorities noticed something odd. "There were a lot of people on the street," said the Aznar adviser. "But no one was yelling at them. Everybody was silent. The people didn't think the terrorists were responsible for the attacks. They thought the United States was responsible. Or Aznar, maybe." SPAIN'S ENTIRE SENSE of its safety rests on the idea that March 11 was condign punishment for its participation in the Iraq war. If Spaniards stopped believing that, they would fall into a panic, and they are fighting against a great deal of evidence to make sure they don't. Days after the Leganés raid, police found a bomb, set and armed, on the high-speed train tracks between Madrid and Seville. When a bomb-damaged videotape found in the raided apartment was reconstructed, it was found to contain a series of warnings--recorded on March 27--that the new government would face more attacks because of its announced wish to join the U.N. in Afghanistan. The tape demanded that Spanish troops retire immediately from "the land of the Muslims"--Afghanistan as well as Iraq. And implicitly one other country that jihadists regard as Muslim: Spain itself. Considering that Muslims ruled in Spain for twice as long as Europeans have lived in North America, many jihadist radicals treat Spain not as an infidel country but an apostate one: "If you don't do this, within the space of a week from today," the March 27 message continued, "we shall continue our jihad until martyrdom in the land of Tariq bin Ziyad"--that is, in Spain. Spain's problem is basically Europe's: It does not want a strategic relationship with the only power that can defend it. [snip!] The psychological strategy Spaniards have pursued since March 11 has become general across Europe, even in countries that (for now) still belong to the coalition. The strategy is to pretend that, just because an American-led invasion of Iraq seems to be the wrong solution, there is no problem. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/037xxgah.asp
