March 16, 2004

Mark Steyn in the Telegraph:
The Spanish dishonoured their dead
Here's a great graf from among many in his piece
"The Spanish dishonoured their dead:"

At the end of last week, American friends kept saying to me: "3/11 is Europe's 9/11. They get it now." I expressed scepticism. And I very much doubt whether March 11 will be a day that will live in infamy. Rather, March 14 seems likely to be the date bequeathed to posterity, in the way we remember those grim markers on the road to conflagration through the 1930s, the tactical surrenders that made disaster inevitable. All those umbrellas in the rain at Friday's marches proved to be pretty pictures for the cameras, nothing more. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the slain. In the three days between the slaughter and the vote, it was widely reported that the atrocity had been designed to influence the election. In allowing it to do so, the Spanish knowingly made Sunday a victory for appeasement and dishonoured their own dead.

Then, here's the opening of David Warren's "Rotten Europe:"

Three days after the worst terror attack in continental Europe since World War II, Spain voted to capitulate. In compliance with the demands made in an Al Qaeda videotape, the Socialist prime minister elect, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, announced yesterday that Spain would withdraw its 1,300 troops from Iraq -- unless, of course, the U.S. turns over the whole operation to the incompetent United Nations. We have seen the spectacle of nine million Spaniards, demonstrating their grief in the streets, their hands raised and painted white in a poignant gesture of mass surrender.

Finally, there's Victor Davis Hanson writing "Blame Whom?" who needs for the U.S. to know that though Spain pull out of our multilateral Iraq Coalition, America's basically been fighting alone anyway:

I can sympathize with the administration diplomats when they insist that we are not alone in Iraq. But they are only right to a degree. We, with the exceptions of some English-speaking allies and eastern Europeans, are in fact absolutely alone in our larger struggle for Western civilization and have been all along well before Iraq, which was merely the latest excuse for ongoing European appeasement. The Spanish will never go after the killers of their own citizens, much less the countries who provided them support and succor, just as the Western Europeans did nothing to stop Mr. Milosevic, just as they sent a token force to Afghanistan, and hardly any to Iraq, and just as the Greeks will do nothing if their Olympics are destroyed by waves of Islamic terrorists.

We should not like all this, but we also should not deny that it is so.

The events of last week, starting with the blasts on Thursday in Madrid and going up to the Socialist rout of Aznar's party on Sunday seemed to be unfolding on TV as if in a dream...a very bad dream.
For we here in the U.S., it seemed that the WOT was going so well that not only had Al Queda fallen asleep, but so had we.
3/ 11 was another wake-up call for us all, but too many of us hit the snooze button, so we got the shock of 3/14 as the alarm klaxon.
Battle has been rejoined by the enemy and new battlegrounds and new victories await.
To see the Spanish capitulation was to relive the shock of France refusing to support us in the U.N. over Iraq all over again.
Watching Europe cave country by country in the 21st Century WOT is to know what is was like to live in 1939, watching Hitler's legions take over the map bit by inevitable bit.
Last week, it was Spain.
Can Italy and the UK be far behind?
"Bush's war," like "Churchill's war" continues.
How unnervingly prescient that British PM Tony Blair gave a speech only a week before Madrid that was strangely akin to Churchill's famous "End of the Beginning" one.
The reknowned historical writer Barbara Tuchman wrote a fine book about WWI called "The Guns of August;" I think someday soon, a new person of letters will write a book on the days we've just lived through called "The Bombs of March" as a turning point for ill (or perhaps for good) in this war.
On 3/11, Al Queda blew up 4 Madrid commuter trains with 10 bombs.
For most of us in America and for our allies who continue to fight alongside us for the preservation of Western civilization, what blew up was our illusions that the "Old World," the birthplace of most of what makes up that fine civilization, could be saved itself.
Sic transit gloria mundi.