Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Bush’s War and Osama’s

(Reprinted from the issue of March 25, 2004)

Hans Blix, the former United Nations arms inspector, has been in this country promoting his new book, Disarming Iraq. He should also be collecting a lot of apologies from the Bush administration and neocon journalists who sneered at him for failing to find the weapons they insisted Saddam Hussein was hoarding.

He was, in his tentative way, right; they, in their belligerent way, were wrong. But they can’t bear to express regret, even as reasons for contrition mount.

The Iraq war, it’s now clear, was a folly. How costly a folly, we don’t know yet, but the postwar occupation continues to drain blood and treasure for no apparent gain. Just the opposite: America’s worldwide reputation may be at its lowest ever, especially in Europe. And the enemy is alive and well.

The terrorist bombings in Madrid on March 11 were exactly what opponents of the war had warned against. More than 200 people died and 1,500 more were injured by the blasts, which appear to have been the work of al-Qaeda or, even more chilling, of one of the similar groups which are now proliferating.

A taped message confirmed that the perpetrators were Arab Muslims. An earlier tape by Osama bin Laden himself had threatened to punish Spain for collaborating with the United States.

These latest attacks were achieved by remote control, not suicide tactics, with cell phones triggering the bombs. The fanatics are refining their methods, using more sophistication and requiring less self-destructive devotion to the cause.

This should make recruiting a bit easier, so we should expect more such attacks. The 9/11 feats may never be repeated, but Madrid’s 3/11 surprise is almost surely only the beginning of a new style of terrorism which will be very hard to prevent.

The bombs had an immediate political result: They knocked the government from power, giving the socialists a victory in the elections held three days after the horror. Spanish voters were furious at the government for lying by blaming Basques, rather than Islamists, for the crimes.
 
Old Europe

But in a sense, the Spaniards were voting against George W. Bush, whom the previous government had supported in his wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the overwhelming unpopularity of this support among the Spanish people. The new socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, had campaigned on a promise to bring Spanish troops home.

American hawks accuse the Spanish voters of caving in to terrorism. The charge is unjust. Spaniards merely judge that Bush’s “war on terrorism” has gone badly, if not madly, awry and that they are now paying the price in their own blood. Like the abstaining countries the Bush crowd sneeringly calls “Old Europe” (which by implication includes the Pope), they want no further part of it.

This is very bad news for George W. Bush. Before the bombings and the election, he could point to Spain as his chief proof that his war policy hadn’t ruptured America’s traditional alliances with Europe. Now those alliances, and American “leadership,” are a shambles.

Today Europe is indeed anti-American, and Bush can thank himself for that. He has put himself in the awkward position of insisting that the Iraq war was warranted, while in effect pleading that he was misled into waging it by faulty intelligence — even though the results were foreseen by countless people whose only source of information was the press. Why didn’t Bush listen to Blix, instead of his neocon brain trust?

Judging from his public remarks, Bush doesn’t feel chastened by events. But he can no longer pretend to have struck crippling blows against the shadowy terrorist network. The Madrid nightmare shows, as it was meant to show, that the Iraq war achieved absolutely nothing. Saddam Hussein is a worthless trophy. He was never the enemy.

Now is the time to reflect on the war fever that followed the 9/11 attacks. War is so horrible, even for the victorious side, that a country must be in an abnormal state of mind when it is actually eager for it. The sure sign of war fever is that it’s those who have reservations about war, rather than those who urge it, who must justify themselves.

But such was the mood of America very recently. Now sobriety has begun to set in.
 
Wasting an Asset

It’s sobering indeed to reflect that the alternative to Bush will be a candidate even further to the left than he is: John Kerry. But things have come to such a pass that American voters, like the Spanish, may feel that the socialist option is the lesser evil.

Bush has actually managed to waste one of the Republicans’ traditional assets: the assurance that they will at least try to limit federal spending. They can no longer even blame the Democrats for staggering budgets and record deficits.

One of the strange facts about today’s politics is that war has become associated with the right. The progressive Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I. The god of American liberals, Franklin Roosevelt, led us into World War II. Harry Truman, another liberal Democrat, went into Korea without even a declaration of war, setting a precedent for Constitution-free warfare that Democrats John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson would apply to Vietnam.

War is big government par excellence, yet Republicans are now proud to claim it as their own cause, almost no matter where, when, or why. Considering how often presidents have found war ruinous after war fever wore off — Truman and Johnson didn’t even seek re-election, and the first George Bush lost to Bill Clinton right after winning the Gulf War — this is something of a mystery to me.

Meanwhile, the real war continues, and the United States isn’t winning it.

While Bush has been taking bows, Osama bin Laden has been watching quietly, with a grim smile at the American’s vanity. “Let the infidel waste America’s wealth in Iraq,” he might have said. “Then we will decide where the jihad will resume.”

An e-mail message to an Arab-language daily in London the night of March 11, purportedly sent by a terrorist group, warned that another attack on the United States is “90% ready — and coming soon.”

If such a thing comes to pass, even if it misfires, it will underline the complete futility of the Iraq war. So will any further terrorist mischief in Europe.


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Joseph Sobran