Canadawide

Hitchens, Sullivan and Cole become unglued over Spain

Hitchens became unglued -- again --and dismissed out of hand the possibility that Al Qaeda will play favorites in Europe. http://slate.msn.com/id/2097138/ For him, the Morocco and Turkey bombings are proof enough that Al Qaeda does not discriminate. In a strange way I wish Al Qaeda was just that stupid, but, alas, they are not. According to CNN and other news sources, Al Qaeda had long thought to drive a wedge between America and its European backers, particularly Spain. I think it to goes without saying that Al Qaeda is more than smart enough to realize that targeting neutral Switzerland, or for that matter Spain again, would drive all of Europe into America’s camp. All and all, Hitchens is right to believe that Al Qaeda loathes the West in its entirety and that it may eventually target us all. However, he is just wrong to think that there is no method to their madness and that they will not act strategically. That being the case, regardless of what one thinks about the war in Iraq or American foreign policy generally, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Spain is much less likely to be attacked again now that it has pleaded to pull its troops out of Iraq.

Hitchens is also wrong about Morocco and Turkey in two respects. First, Al Qaeda did not target Muslims in either of these two countries. Their targets in Turkey were Turkey’s Jewish community and British bankers and in Morocco foreigner visitors. Two, the aim of those two attacks was drive the West out of those two countries. In this respect the fact that Muslims were also killed is gravy as far as Al Qaeda is concerned. It only helps them establish a belief amongst the population that if they what to be safe they should avoid the West.

Again, I fill strange in saying this, but my worry now is that Al Qaeda will decide to give Germany et al a mulligan on Afghanistan and will pick off America’s Iraq allies one by one. If they do this, and this, by the way, can not happen overnight, they can, if they play their cards right, make non-alignment with American Foreign policy a key election issue throughout the Western democracies. Heck, if they really wanted to, they could probably influence domestic policy to a much lesser extent (e.g., energizing non-Muslim opposition to France’s head scarf ban.)

If Al Qaeda does succeed in doing this, the alliances that the Left has forged with Europe’s Muslim community, according to an EU report the main reason for the upsurge in Anti-Semitism in the last 3 years, will become stronger and there will be an even greater upsurge in European anti Semitism. http://canadawide.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_canadawide_archive.html [Scroll down to "France's scarf Ban".]

(Read here how EU officials are trying to disguise this fact. http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2004%2F04%2F01%2Fwsemit01.xml&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=11497

Andrew Sullivan is equally misguided in thinking that the since Al Qaeda is targeting the coalition of the willing, this is proof that pre war Iraq was a terrorist hot bed and Saddam and Al Qaeda were linked. "BIN LADEN'S VICTORY IN SPAIN" March 15 posting http://andrewsullivan.com/ This is just an aside, but I would like every one who still thinks this to say after me. There is little evidence that Saddam and Al Qaeda were linked and that, by the way, pace Hitchens, Chalabi is a lying scum bag. Now what was I saying? The reason Al Qaeda has taken up the Iraq cause is the same reason they have taken up the Palestinian cause. Like Saddam before them, Al Qaeda seeks to gain credibility within the Arab world by standing up to the West.

Sullivan and Hitchens were not the only ones to come unglued over this. Juan Cole also went off, throwing out red herring after Iraqi red herring, for entirely different reasons. http://www.juancole.com/ March 16th posting. In disparaging the reliablity of polling, Cole even engaged in a little anti intellectualism when he was unable to make a point through reasoned argument. “Although it keeps being said that the conservatives were leading in the polls before the Madrid bombings, polls are notoriously unreliable. Polls once suggested Dewey would beat Truman, too. I think the conservatives were doomed all along, and the polling just wasn't showing how unhappy people were.” I am sorry Cole but you are wrong. First, it is one thing to say that this or that poll failed to predict a close election. It is another thing altogether to say that polling routinely fails to predict that a party will loose 35 seats. Second, Spanish people were happy with the conservative party despite the fact that they took Spain into Iraq. After and because of the Madrid bombings terrorism and Iraq supplanted the economy as the number one issue and the Conservatives lost going away.

Finally, other people have suggested that the ruling party lost because it still held onto the myth that ETA was responsible even when it was clear that they were not; in other words, people were upset that they lied. Now while there is certainly a lot of truth to this, in so far as the government's stalling tactics were predictable, this does not lessen the magnitude of the Al Qaeda victory. Christ, I do not follow Spanish politics at all and I said right off the bat that such stalling tactics were likely. That being said, how likely is it that Al Qaeda, who had been thinking about the political ramifications of a bombing for months, would not come to the same conclusion as me?