Spain’s Whirlwind Weekend

Just imagine this: 5:30 EST October 30th, 2004: a NJ transit train from New York explodes in multiple locations, killing hundreds and wounding thousands.

The Bush administration says it was Syrian nationalist, and on Halloween, the US military begins bombing them into the stone age. Then a video surfaces; it was actually Al-Quaeda, and Ossama bin Laden himself is laughing at us from a cave in Afghanistan/Pakistan. On the tape he says how he got all those terrorists from Baghdad into the US via ship containers.

Then on November 2nd, 2004, something amazing happens, instead of people rallying around the president like they did over 3 years ago, Americans vote in John Kerry by overwhelming margins, and Democrats take back both houses of congress. Exit polls show that the public didn’t like how quick Bush was to blame an easy target and how Iraq and the administration’s inability to protect the public again made them very angry.

Sound far fetched? That is essentially what happened in Spain from Thursday to Sunday, only the Spanish public was never behind the war on Iraq in the first place. The "Madrid Massacre,"as some like to call it is a horrific act of violence with no real reason other than violence itself.

I haven’t commented on these events at length so far because I wanted to have time to think about who was behind it and why. We can be fairly certain that it was an Al-Quaeda group, or at least a like minded group, given the evidence found in an unexploded bomb and the arrests made by the Spanish government.

Many have commented that liberals haven’t reacted strongly or properly to events such as these. Polls show that Americans still view Republicans and Bush as better on National Defense/Security and Iraq, despite Kerry’s current narrow lead. Why is this? Is it because, as neocons claim, liberals see this as a police action and not what it is, an act of war? (Ex-Senator Bob Kerrey hates the term "war on terrorism" because he says we are at war with Al-Quaeda, not a method. If we were at war with terrorism, we would have troops in Israel, Columbia, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Chechnya, and many other places.)

At the same time, the war cannot be won "the old fashioned way" by knocking over client states like Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria. America is fighting a non-state actor who can live in countries that support them, like Afghanistan or Pakistan, but also ones that don’t like Germany, or the US. If the US really wanted to knock out all these states, it would have troops knocking in doors in Saudi Arabian Madrassas and charity groups.

Bush is right that it is a long battle with little apparent progress due to the covert nature of the work. But that fact that it hasn't happened again doesn't mean we are succeeding. In fact, it means the US has been damn lucky. Lucky that the shoe bomber's wick wouldn’t light. Lucky that they have decided on focusing their attacks on Iraq, Turkey and Spain and not the US.

To win this war, the US needs to search all points of entry, develop alternative sources of energy/reduce its dependence on foreign oil, stop supporting the governments of Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian regimes in the Islamic world for the sake of "stability" and start supporting democratic uprisings, create a visa tracking system based on technology and crack down of violators, create a national id system that would ensure that identity theft is as small as possible and only authorized individuals receive them (and not track the movements of US citizens or permanent aliens). The US and its allies need to strike a new covenant with the very people that are strapping bombs to their bodies: we will support economic development, hope and opportunity. In exchange, you will realistically engage Israel and come to terms that the Jews will have their own country and aren't going to leave (but again the Israeli government will have to pull out of settlements).

200 people in Spain shouldn't have to die for the world to wake up to the problem, 3,000 people in the US shouldn’t have to die for America to wake up to the problem either. While Democrats and Republicans can play with fire and say the other can't be trusted to keep America safe, they both need to realize there is much more yet to do.