How terrorism will win

Editorial

Three days after bombs exploded on the commuter trains of Madrid, Spanish voters unexpectedly turfed their conservative government and elected the socialist opposition. The day after the election, the new prime minister-designate announced that Spain would pull out of the Iraqi conflict.

The cataclysm of the past week offers a lesson in how international relations can be affected by terrorism or, as we phrased it after the 9/11 attacks, how the terrorists win.

There is still some debate over who perpetrated the Madrid attacks. At first, it seemed Basque separatists were to blame, but the finger turned quickly to Islamists with links to al-Qaeda.

Since the 1970s, we have seen the rise of paramilitary organizations with diverse names and aims, using such methods as random bombings, hi-jackings and hostage-takings to advance various agendas. These terrorists, by definition, do not target the apparatus of the state, but the lives, safety and sense of security of the citizens of a country. How, we might ask, do such random killings advance the specific agenda of an ideology?

Remember: after the World Trade Centre attacks, a significant proportion of Americans placed blame for the mass murders not on the terrorists, but on American foreign policy. If America were not supporting regimes like Israel's and Saudi Arabia's, went the logic, this would never have happened.

Though the Bush administration has made some disastrous foreign and domestic decisions in the name of the war on terror, there is a single core belief that George W. Bush has steadfastly defended, which is that terrorism must be punished, never rewarded. Terrorism – the premeditated murder of civilian non-combatants – must never be seen to succeed, nor should it ever be justified by its ends. Murdering civilians is the most immoral, illegitimate political act imaginable. This statement is not an axiom of diplomacy or international relations, it is a cornerstone of what it means to be human.

Whether the terrorists who killed almost 200 Spanish civilians intended such a direct, unambiguous and immediate victory granted them by Spain's voters and their new prime minister can only be speculated. Practically, it hardly matters, because perception is reality. If terrorism is seen to work, it will become the better mousetrap that replaces negotiated settlements.

And rarely has it appeared to work as brilliantly as it did last week in Spain.
Correctly or not, the withdrawal of Spain from the Iraqi conflict will be seen as a direct result of the attacks on the trains last week. As a further result, prepare for a whole new epoch in the era of attacks on civilian targets worldwide. If a country's foreign policy can be reversed by killing dozens or hundreds of its citizens, the foreign policy battle is about to open on a whole new front.

It's true that the terrorists may be less likely to attack Spain again. They'll move down to the next enemy, using a similar or perhaps more brutal approach to gain a similar result from others who oppose their goals. In this sense, Spain is a safer place than it was. But the rest of the world is far more dangerous.

This is not the first time Spain has been used as a testing ground for a titanic battle between competing ideologies. The Spanish Civil War, the "last great cause" as it was known once, was a proxy battle between Western pluralist democracies and the tyranny of fascism.

Among other lessons from history, Israel of course has much to offer on this subject. Though that country's negotiations with Yasser Arafat belie its stated rule of never negotiating with terrorists, Israel has been the paragon of the adage that one must reward negotiation and punish terror. Has it worked? Sometimes. Terror attacks on civilian non-combatants continue, reduced by intelligence and defensive actions by Israel's military. Terror remains too effective and too frequent, but it occurs with far less frequency than it would if Israeli responses to terror were as accommodating as Spain's.

Canada has a federal election coming up, in which foreign policy will play a part. During the campaign, some people will almost certainly assert that terrorism – the deliberate killing of civilians – is a legitimate form of protest for desperate peoples. This statement must never go unchallenged, particularly by Canadian Jews who understand how this issue relates fundamentally to Israel's survival.

If a series of bombs can reverse public opinion in a Western, democratic country on a core foreign policy plank – and what is more core than the decision for a country to wage a war? – then a couple more bombings in Europe and North America, and Israel could very well be alone in the Middle East without a trustworthy friend in the world.

This is how the terrorists win.

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