Mayhem in Madrid: Cui Bono?

"The appalling thing," remarked Lord Acton of the French Revolution, "is not the tumult, but the design. Through all the fire and smoke we perceive the evidence of calculating organization. The managers remain studiously concealed and masked; but there is no doubt about their presence from the first." When international terrorists devastated one of Europe's greatest cities last week, television viewers were deluged--as with the events of September 11, 2001--by the tumultuous images of smoking wreckage, the dead and wounded, and the throngs of traumatized survivors.

Before the debris settled came the first arrests. The prime suspects in the Madrid attacks appear to be known terrorists with connections to last year's Casablanca suicide bombings and the events of 9-11. One of the first to be detained, Jamal Zougam, a Moroccan phone salesman, was identified as a likely terrorist as early as August 2001, when Spanish police searched his Madrid apartment. Among Zougam's effects investigators found a video of Mujaheddin fighters in Russian Daghestan and the phone numbers of three members of the al-Qaeda cell allegedly run by Imad Yarkas--who is in jail in Spain under suspicion of having helped to plan the September 11th attacks on the United States. The Moroccan government had warned Spain that Zougam, who was recruited by al-Qaeda as far back as 1997, was in the country. Yet in spite of the damning evidence, Zougam and his half-brother, Mohamed Chaoui, another Moroccan with a shady dossier, were ignored by Spanish authorities in a roundup of 35 suspected al-Qaeda members last September--a roundup that netted Yarkas himself.

Whiffs of official foreknowledge? Perhaps. But in all the tumult--the death, destruction and recriminations--what is the design? Conventional wisdom, retailed by the major media, assures us that the Madrid bombings were an act of retribution against the conservative Aznar government, one of President Bush's staunchest allies in the war on terrorism and the ongoing occupation of Iraq. For his alliance with Bush, Aznar paid a high political price. Shortly after the horrific attacks, thousands of Spanish protesters swept into the streets of Spain's major cities to protest both the attacks and the policies of the incumbent Spanish government. Aznar and his party were voted out of power a few days later, blamed for bringing down the wrath of Islamic terrorists on hundreds of innocent civilians. Spain's prime minister-elect, Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has already pledged to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq, or so the media mandarins would have us believe.

But Zapatero--contrary to the official version of events--has not promised to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. Rather, he has threatened to do so --unless authority over military forces there is handed over to the United Nations by July I of this year. "If on June 30," Zapatero said in his first interview after the election, "we haven't managed ... to give the United Nations the central role in the whole political process if we are stuck with demands to follow a policy that leads nowhere then Spain would ... ask its troops to leave and return to Spain after June 30. But if we find a new attitude in the Security Council, if we get a new Security Council Resolution ... then we'd be ready to envisage contributing so that the whole international community, with the Arab League, can unite against terrorism and face up to this challenge." In other words, Mr. Zapatero finds nothing objectionable in principle with the Iraq occupation, but only with the policy supposedly being pursued: the nations of Europe following the "unilateralist" leadership of the United States, rather than deterring to the United Nations. Arguments like these--issued against the backdrop of another major terrorist attack on the West, and reinforced by the threat of a fractured alliance in Iraq--may yet provide the rhetorical camouflage for pro UN Insiders in Washington to hand over military authority in Iraq to the UN, a step that would have been politically much more difficult before the recent events in Spain.

There is, moreover, another likely side effect of the unexpected rise of Zapatero the Euro-socialist: the acceleration of European unification. Eurocrats in Brussels have been working for months on a constitution for the European Union that would nullify once and for all the sovereignty of EU member states. Recently, however, the process ground to a halt, blocked by Aznar in a dispute over Spanish voting rights. Now, according to a Reuters story, pro-EU diplomats are jubilant at the political changes in Madrid, believing that the election of Zapateros "has changed the outlook for the [European] constitution." Elsewhere, Reuters reported that Zapateros has "pledged to try to help break the diplomatic deadlock over a new European constitution. 'I think we can reach an agreement which will maintain the balance of power for an enlarged Europe,' he said."

Whatever the other ramifications may be, the Madrid bombings and their tumultuous aftermath are likely to add impetus to the drive both for UN empowerment in Iraq and for the completion of the EU constitution in Europe. Is there a design to be perceived here? As criminal investigators are wont to ask: cui bono--for whose benefit?