THE RAIN IN SPAIN
Excerpt from
"America Alone, The end of the world as we know it"
By Mark Steyn
If the critical date for Americans in the new century is September 11,
2001, for Continentals it's a day two and a half years later, in March
2004. On the eleventh of the month, just before Spain's general election,
a series of train bombings in Madrid killed more than two hundred people.
That day, I received a tone of e-mails from American acquaintances
along the lines of: "3/11 is Europe's 9/11. Even the French will be in."
Friends told me: "The Europeans get it now." Doughty warriors of the
blogosphere posted the Spanish flag on their home pages in solidarity
with America's loyal allies in the war against terrorism. John Ellis, a Bush
cousin and a savvy guy with a smart website, declared, "Every memberstate
of the EU understands that Madrid is Rome is Berlin is Amsterdam
is Paris is London is New York."
All wrong. On Friday, March 12, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards
filled Madrid's streets and stood somberly in a bleak drizzle to mourn
their dead. On Sunday, election day, the voters tossed out Jose Maria
Aznar's sadly misnamed Popular Party and handed the government to
the Socialist Worker's Party. Aznar's Party was America's principal Continental
ally in Iraq; the Socialist Workers campaigned on a pledge to
withdraw Spain's troops from Iraq. Throughout the campaign, polls
showed the Popular Party cruising to victory. Then came the bomb.
Having invited people to choose between a strong horse and a weak
horse, even Osama bin Laden might have been surprised to see the Spanish
opt to make their general election an exercise in mass self-gelding.
Within seventy-two hours of the carnage, voters sent a tough message to
the terrorists: "We apologize for catching your eye." Whether or not
Madrid is Rome and Berlin and Amsterdam and Paris, it certainly isn't
New York.
To be sure, there were all kinds of Kerryesque footnoted nuances to
that stark election result. One sympathized with those voters reported to
be angry at the government's pathetic insistence, in the face of emerging
evidence, that the bomb attack was the work of ETA, the Basque
nationalist terrorists, when it was so obviously the jihad boys. One's
sympathy, however, disappeared with their decision to vote for a party committed
to disengaging from the war. And no one will remember the footnotes,
the qualification--just the final score: terrorists toppled a
European government.