Will the Madrid Massacre Become Europe's 9/11? posted by Richard Seymour

No, of COURSE it won't!

Timothy Garton Ash, our beloved "tortured liberal" at The Guardian, is expert at plucking the latest liberal abortiveness from the zeitgeist and turning it into another reason why We Must Unite Europe! It seems this guy won't stop with his EU-fetishism. Blair goes to war, we need more European integration. US President a moron, we need a European Defence Force. Terrorist attack in Madrid, we need Franco-Spanish unity. But check this out from his latest :

"If it was al-Qaida, then few will doubt that this is Europe's 9/11. Those commuters will have been murdered as punishment for the sins of the west. (No matter that the innocent victims included Muslims from north Africa now living in the suburbs of Madrid. Don't bother Islamist terrorists with such details.) To prevent future attacks will require even closer cooperation between European police and intelligence services, and Europe-wide immigration and asylum procedures. We will finally wake up to the fact that Islamist terrorism is a threat geographically closer to us than to America. It will be clear what Europe has to do, although no easier to do it.

There will also be a deeper case for European solidarity. If Aznar's government is being singled out for joining what al-Qaida calls the "Crusader-Zionist alliance" in the Iraq war, the lesson to be learned in this moment is not that no European government should ever participate in any action in the Muslim world for fear of reprisals. It's that Europeans should stick closer together, one way or the other."

A distinctly global problem (Indonesia, Turkey, Kenya, Saudi Arabia etc) thus becomes a specifically European problem. If Ash wants "European-wide immigration and asylum procedures", of course, he need only await the completion of Fortress Europe. The measures being undertaken by EU governments include the effective militarisation of the EU's external frontiers, both on land and at sea; policies of destitution, detention and deportation; punitive sanctions for airlines, shipping companies and road hauliers who fail to police their passengers by applying rigid documentation standards that ignore the often desperate need of refugees for clandestine travel; and the setting of ever higher refugee recognition hurdles on an asylum track of shrinking legal protections. None of this augurs particularly well for human rights, but after all, since we know that your average asylum seeker is probably a terrorist incognito it would be churlish not to acknowledge "what Europe has to do" even if it will be "no easier to do it". (Notice that this truly is tortured liberalism - a humane conscience tormented, torn out of figure, by the knowledge of the brutal measures it must undertake).

Aside from anything else, it is transparently the case that the Madrid Massacre will not become Europe's 9/11. It will not do so for two simple reasons: 1) It wasn't on television, and 2) Spain doesn't have the werewithal to launch a series of aggressive wars, even supposing a specific country could be saddled with the blame for this atrocity. What took place on 9/11 was shown on television screens as it happened around the world. I watched it, (awaiting, in vain, Tony Blair's drubbing at the TUC), and watched it, and watched it. No amount of repetitions of that same, bleak image could tear my eyes from that screen. It was shocking both because Americans were the victims (a matter of some schadenfreude among certain European cynics), and also because it actualised the horror moment from every US disaster film of the 1990s. And finally, it carried with it a horrendous sense of doom since noone could predict how the United States government would react to that horror. I knew people who seriously anticipated a nuclear strike on Iraq, or Sudan, or North Korea.

The Spanish tragedy will remain that, most likely, just as the tragedy of Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, the Congo, and every other country which has suffered horrendous barbarity will remain its own. If some Al Qaeda affiliated group turns out to be responsible for this it may resonate more broadly, but it will not have the phantasmatic impact that planes destroying two vast towers in one of the world's richest, most populous and most vibrant cities did.

Is it Al Qaeda? Well, Al Qaeda cells have been discovered in Spain. In November 2001, Spanish authorities arrested eight men suspected of being Al Qaeda operatives involved in the September 11 attacks. In September 2003, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon said the September 11 attacks were partially planned in Spain. There were some spurious attempts at connecting Al Qaeda with ETA - because one of the alleged Al Qaeda members was also said to have had some past links with Bantusana, the 'political wing of ETA' - but experts note that ETA's secular-nationalist agenda (expressed in the idiom of mutilated Marxism) is a world away from Islamic fundamentalism. (By the way, don't you just love the abuse of language involved here? Sinn Fein are similarly "the political wing of the IRA". And what, may we ask, is not political about what the IRA and ETA say and do? What is meant, of course, is that Bantusana and Sinn Fein pursue parliamentary success, which is the only genuine application of the term 'politics' in the bourgeois lexicon.) So, it shouldn't be altogether surprising to find Al Qaeda trying to launch an attack on Spain, and we shouldn't need to refer to the Crusades to figure it out. The attack would be their first on the European main-land (the GIA attacks in France belong to a different category), and is directed at a significant European partner in the 'war on terror'.

But let's all amen the PM: "This terrorism is terrorism waged without limit, without any care for the grief of the innocent... but like previous battles vital to the progress of humankind, this one too will be won." Yeah, Tony, someone's going to win it. But since you implicitly acknowledge now that there are different levels of terrorism - that with limits and that without - where do we rank your terror attacks on Iraq? We all acknowledge how appalling ETA's attacks on government buildings in Spain are, just as we cursed the IRA for its explosions in Belfast, London and Manchester. But at least they gave warnings, PM, at least they gave police the opportunity to clear the area and protect innocents. Who warned the Iraqis in that market place when you decided to take them out? And are your 'limits' reached at the minimum of 8437 civilians killed in Iraq? Or do we aim for the stars?