A Comment on "A Victory for Terrorism"
Comments from Pat Forde on my "A Victory for
Terrorism" entry
Often, when I post an entry to my blog, I will send
the entry to friends as well. They often respond with their views. Below is a
very well thought out e-mail from Pat
Forde.
Hi Richard,
I, too, was disappointed when the
news came in of Spain's election
results. A
surprising result, considering the evidence is pointing to al-Qaeda, and
the voters knew it going to the polls . . .
It was clearly a mistake of
out-going prime
minister Aznar to try to play off the worst terror attack on the
European continent since WWII as the work of
ETA---but I suppose he had a pretty
good
read of his own people, and knew that if the government came right out
and said "Well, looks like it was al-Qaeda",
they'd vote him out of office for
putting
Spanish troops in Iraq and bringing Spain to the attention of the
terrorists in the first
place.
I.E. The Spanish people
clearly already had strong feelings against
having their troops in Iraq/against the
whole Iraq war, prior to the "3/11"
terrorist attacks last week. I suppose the
logic of this to the average voting
Spaniard
on the street must be something along the lines
of:
"The war in Iraq was an
international crime"
"Ergo, we got what
was coming to us."
The sad result
of that kind of thinking, as you've pointed out, is that
al-Qaeda gets the message that they *can*
successfully manipulate democratic
election
results by wielding mass terror on a voting public shortly before the
polls open.
An article from Canada's Ottawa
Citizen newspaper stated it this way:
"For al-Qaeda, it is a huge victory after 30 months of continuous
setbacks. They have tried a new tactic, and
it works . . . Count on it: they will not
now abandon this tactic. And they are likely
to try it in the United States
as well, to
defeat President Bush in November."
Frankly, I disagree with that last line. Al-Qaeda will certainly try this
new tactic again in other countries,
particularly European states . . . But I
suspect it would backfire if used in the
USA.
I may be
wrong.
Maybe another al-Qaeda attack
shortly before the election would convince
American voters that Bush's War on Terror
has utterly failed, and thus it's
time to
get rid of him.
Now that would be a
truly back-assward way to view such an attack . . .
Because it would surely convince
al-Qaeda/America's enemies that terrorists
strikes on US soil can control US politics.
Thus, the terrorists essentially are
in
charge of US democracy and the face of US executive administrations.
(BTW, I'm no Bush supporter
myself, I think he's made some terrible
mistakes---most important being launching a
war against Iraq on the basis of
'weapons of
mass destruction', when a case for 'regime change' in Iraq might have
been made on far more solid grounds . . . As
your earlier email pointed out, the
Iraqi
constitution is a huge step forward; although its just a drop in the
nearly empty pro-regime-change bucket for
most Western media, which have
submerged
themselves and the viewing public in an olympic-sized pool of
anti-regime-change
sentiment.)
On the other hand, I
can hope that Americans would refuse to lie down
before the lion, and would vote Bush back in
if an attack happened in late
October, say.
Best for
now,
Pat
Posted: Thu - March 25, 2004 at 12:30 AM