The Spanish general election result is a disaster. The Spanish have reacted to the atrocity in Madrid by dumping a government that was committed to fight terror and replacing it by a government that will appease it. Eleven million Spaniards took to the streets last weekend to show their solidarity in the face of terror, and two days later voted to abase themselves before it. Al Q'aeda could not have more perfectly choreographed a result that serves its cause. Its warped and dishonest logic (see my article today) has been swallowed by the Spanish voters so that instead of standing firm against terror and redoubling their efforts to defeat it, they have effectively fled before it by implicitly blaming Mr Aznar, rather than the terrorists, for the the carnage.

Already the Prime Minister-elect has said he will pull Spanish troops out of Iraq, thus undermining the difficult but vital task of reconstructing that country and defeating the forces which have poured into Iraq since the war to prevent that from happening. Indeed, the fact that Islamist extremists are fighting so desperately to prevent Iraq from becoming stable and prosperous demonstrates the bankruptcy of the argument that Iraq had nothing to do with the defence against terror. It was a cockpit for terror; and a peaceful, orderly Iraq would be a serious blow against terror. That's what we went in. That's why we have to make it work. That's why we are being fought there now. And that's why the prospective Spanish appeasement is such a disaster.

The greater danger still is that such appeasement will be catching. Tony Blair would not be human if he did not look at that Spanish result and shudder. The risk now is that no government will be willing to continue to fight against the forces that threaten us, for fear that if there is an atrocity at home then it, not the perpetrators, will be blamed. Even if Blair holds firm -- which I think he will -- others may not, and Britain will become isolated along with the US.

The other desperately alarming aspect of the Madrid bombings is the fact that the intelligence services were once again caught with their trousers down. The assumption is that the Spanish government concealed its suspicions that al Q'aeda was responsible and blamed Eta instead in order to deflect public anger. I think the truth is far worse than this. I think the Spanish government was being told by intelligence it was Eta because it and other western intelligence services had picked up not a whisper of any Islamist 'chatter'. As the Times reports:

'It is understood that neither British nor American intelligence agencies had been expecting an al-Qaeda attack in Spain and the Spanish authorities were geared up only for a possible Eta strike. British officials said that the main reason that Eta had been blamed at the start was that it had already tried and failed to bomb the railways, although on a small scale. “This seemed like a second attempt by Eta, but on a much larger scale,” one official said.

'The British Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre at MI5’s London headquarters, which operates round the clock, had shared the initial view that Eta was responsible. In spite of the apparent telltale signs of an al-Qaeda attack — notably the well co-ordinated multiple-target approach — Britain and America went along with the Spanish analysis. “The Spanish know more about Eta than anyone else,” one British official said. The lack of any intelligence to the contrary made it even more inevitable that Eta was blamed, even though it had never before attempted an attack on such a scale. But after the discovery of the “al- Qaeda” videotape and a mobile phone attached to explosives, British security officials admitted: “The wind is now blowing in the direction of al-Qaeda.” The Madrid bombings have reminded the West’s security agencies of an audiotape broadcast by al-Jazeera television station last October, when Osama bin Laden threatened countries involved in the Iraq war. He named Britain, Spain, Australia, Poland, Japan and Italy.

'British officials said that the terrorist threat assessment was being updated constantly, but that there were no indications of a likely strike against a British target — although the lack of intelligence before the Madrid bombings was a complicating factor.'

You bet it's a complicating factor! How can we have any faith in the spooks to warn of an impending strike against Britain when it took them so long to realise what was blindingly obvious in Madrid from the start?

Al Q'aeda is an immensely sophisticated, shrewd outfit. It has got only one thing wrong: it underestimated the resolve of America. But it understands perfectly the decadence of Europe. The vast majority of Spaniards were always against the war in Iraq. They were therefore a soft target who would crumble under attack. Britain contains a large number of people with similar appeasement views. The more those voices drown out those who would stand firm against terror, the more Britain will become a target for a similar attack with a similar political objective in mind.

Posted by melanie at March 15, 2004