[A-List] US imperialism: accumulating blowback

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

'War on terror' suffers setback in Spain
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, March 17 2004

WASHINGTON - It was just last week, on the eve of one of the bloodiest acts
of terrorism in Europe's modern history, that Central Intelligence Agency
director George Tenet warned that the US administration's optimistic
rhetoric on winning the "war on terrorism" was premature.

Al-Qaeda has "infected others with its ideology, which depicts the United
States as Islam's greatest foe", Tenet told lawmakers on Capitol Hill. "The
steady growth of Osama bin Laden's anti-American sentiment through the wider
Sunni extremist movement, and the broad dissemination of al-Qaeda's
destructive expertise, ensure that a serious threat will remain for the
foreseeable future, with or without al-Qaeda in the picture.

"Even so, as al-Qaeda reels from our blows, other extremist groups within
the movement it influenced have become the next wave of terrorist threat.
Dozens of such groups exist," even in Europe, Tenet noted.

Whether al-Qaeda was behind last week's Madrid bombings or the perpetrators
were part of the "next wave", both the bombings and their electoral impact -
the defeat of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, one of US President
George W Bush's few Western allies in the war in Iraq - constitute serious
blows to the president and his anti-terror strategy, according to analysts
here.

Indeed, that the bombings took place on the eve of operation "Mountain
Storm", an unprecedented US offensive coordinated with some 70,000 Pakistani
troops in eastern Pakistan to hunt down bin Laden once and for all,
underlines the extent to which the Bush administration's anti-terrorist
strategy - in essence diverted for 15 months by war in Iraq - might have
fallen behind the curve.

"The way the administration has carried out its war, especially its attack
on Iraq, may have sown dragon's teeth," said one government official who
asked to not be identified. "The fact that we and the Europeans had no clue
this was coming shows how little we know about the 'next wave'."

Hans Blix, the former hapless chief United Nations weapons inspector, also
suggested that Bush's decision to take the "war on terrorism" to Iraq -
despite the lack of any documented operational links between Baghdad and
al-Qaeda or other Sunni extremist groups - might have made things worse.

In an interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Blix said the war had
"not put an end to terrorism in the world ... on the contrary, the result of
this iron-fisted approach has been to give it a boost", said the Swede, who
is due in the United States in the coming days for an extended tour to sell
his new book, Disarming Iraq.

That message also appeared to be the one received by Spain's prime
minister-elect, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose Socialist Party was
expected to lose handily to Prime Minister Aznar's Popular Party, at least
until last Thursday's bombings.

"The war in Iraq was a disaster, the occupation of Iraq is a disaster,"
Rodriguez told a Spanish radio station on Monday, suggesting that Bush and
British Prime Minister Tony Blair "engage in some self-criticism" over their
decision to invade Iraq.

"Wars such as those which have occurred in Iraq only allow hatred, violence
and terror to proliferate," the new prime minister declared, reaffirming his
position that Spain will continue to fight terrorism, but that its troops
will withdraw from Iraq on July 1 unless the UN Security Council takes
charge of the peacekeeping operation there, something Bush has long opposed.

Though Spain has deployed 1,300 troops to Iraq, slightly less than 1 percent
of the total number of foreign occupation forces, it is the third-largest
contingent from Western Europe, after the United Kingdom and Italy.

Even more important, Aznar, who was himself not running for re-election, was
considered among Bush's top foreign allies, indeed second only to Blair,
whose own political popularity has plummeted in the wake of the Iraq war to
by far its lowest level in his seven-year tenure amid charges that he and
Bush deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Baghdad in the run-up to
the war.

As a top US ally, Spain was slated to receive benefits from its backing for
the war and participation in the occupation. Aznar was rewarded in part by
the Bush administration's decision to include Batasuna, a radical Basque
nationalist party linked to the armed ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque
Homeland and Liberty) movement, on the State Department's list of
international terrorist groups. And last November, US Chamber of Commerce
president Thomas Donohue assured Spanish business leaders they would get
privileged treatment in bidding for reconstruction projects in Iraq.

But despite Aznar's prominence preceding the US-led attack - he, Bush and
Blair all captured the global media spotlight at their joint "war summit" in
the Azores just days before the offensive was launched - he never convinced
more than a small minority of Spaniards that it was a good idea.
Public-opinion polls showed that opposition to the war ran higher in Spain
than in almost every other European country except Italy, at more than 80
percent.

Still, Aznar was thought unlikely to suffer much politically, because of the
widespread belief that most Spanish voters were unlikely to cast their vote
based on foreign-policy issues. And until the bombings occurred,
public-opinion polls appeared to bear out that belief.

The fact that the bombings so clearly influenced the election's final
outcome came as a shock to some analysts, who said the chain of events,
including Rodriguez' pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq, would undoubtedly
encourage similar strikes by Islamic militants in Western countries.

"The most troubling thing about this is the way the incoming Spanish
government is sending a message to terrorists that this may be a potential
model for them to affect policy and elections," said Lee Feinstein, a senior
fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a centrist think-tank in
Washington. "It's a mistake to call for a withdrawal of troops, as if this
were a response to the attacks, because the Socialist Party's opposition to
the Iraq war is long-standing."

However, Feinstein predicted that the bombings will likely result in much
greater attention by the European Union to the dangers of international
terrorism.

Neo-conservative Democrat and US Senator Joe Lieberman said any withdrawal
by Spain would amount to appeasement, a position echoed by Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

"Anyone who thinks that if ... a nation's troops stay out of a particular
military conflict that they'll be somehow protected from the fanatical
Islamic terrorists, is just wrong," Lieberman said. "That's the same kind of
logic that [late British prime minister] Neville Chamberlain [used] in
Munich to try to pacify [Adolf] Hitler in the late 1930s, and obviously that
didn't work."

At the same time, the Socialist victory in Spain is certain to strengthen
the positions of France and Germany, both of which opposed the war in Iraq,
inside the EU. Like Spain's Socialists, the French and German governments
fully supported military action in Afghanistan and elsewhere against
al-Qaeda, but strongly opposed the war against Iraq in the absence of any
evidence that tied Baghdad to the terrorist group.