SPANISH voters sent a strong message to Madrid last week: They told their leaders they could do without "Mr. Bush's war." No doubt incensed by the horrific train bombing a few days before the elections, Spain's record voter turnout demonstrated what every poll and protest in the country has been saying for over a year: that the Spanish people were overwhelmingly against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and have been since the start. The Spanish government supported the Iraq war despite clear opposition by a vast majority of their constituency, and now its ruling party has rightly paid the price with its landslide defeat at the polls. The ensuing announcements by Honduras and Nicaragua that they too will remove (or at least not replace) their troops in Iraq, while the Dutch, Polish and El Salvadorian governments consider following suit, show a clear pattern emerging: The international community is deciding it would much rather fight a real war on terrorism than go along with the Bush administration's sham job in Iraq.
Has invading Iraq made America any safer? Hardly. Many security experts have expressed concern that the train bombing that killed 201 people in Madrid last week could have just as easily happened in London's Underground, the Paris Metro or Chicago's El. Spain was clearly not made "safer" by assisting in the invasion of Iraq, and what makes President Bush think America is any different is unfathomable. Lest he think that opponents of the Iraq war are somehow exempt from terrorist threats, the French government has also been recently threatened with violence that, as stated in a letter sent to a Parisian newspaper, will make "blood run to [its] borders."
The war in Iraq had little or nothing to do with countering terrorism. Americans were treated to trumped-up or downright fictitious stories about weapons of mass destruction in order for President Bush to claim that we faced a "war of necessity." But as every major intelligence outlet has repeatedly had to clarify, Iraq had little or no ties to international terrorism -- in fact, Hussein and al Qaeda were bitter enemies. This president, lacking even a shred of evidence to the contrary, played down that connection and instead chose to sensationalize the WMD issue. For almost a year, we heard little or nothing about the real villain of Sept. 11 -- Osama bin Laden. Only last week did news break about the hunt for holdout Taliban members and bin Laden finally intensifying, with operation "Mountain Storm" commencing this spring in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What, exactly, took so long for us to start hunting for al Qaeda? Essentially, the Bush administration was willing to put the real war on terrorism on hold in order to focus on its own pet project -- fabricating claims about Iraq and invading that country (and her enormous oil fields), thus finishing the plan that George Bush the Elder began. Meanwhile, American homeland security remains underfunded and neglected. Many major ports, railways and cargo routes are still completely undefended. Air cargo screening, oneof the so-called "major priorities" of the Bush homeland security initiative, has predictably been ignored in the last two and a half years. While cities and counties try to retool and modernize their local security infrastructure, the Bush administration has actually cut their funding, which they desperately need to meet costs. Contrast to Spain, where the new liberal party in power has concrete plans to address the very real security concerns its conservative predecessors ignored -- like securing borders, patrolling air and sea routes and protecting potential targets. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
American conservatives will undoubtedly now publicly tar Spain (or perhaps organize another childish boycott, anti-France-style) for yielding to terror or "appeasing" it. Of course, those same voices were silent when President Bush decided to withdraw the massive American military presence from Saudi Arabia immediately following Sept. 11 -- a key demand of al Qaeda. It's vital that the more reasonable among us understand that combating terrorism does not just involve more bombs and cowboy-style, go-it-alone foreign policy. Those tactics may work in Texas, but thankfully, the real world works very differently. The Bush administration was able to bully and bribe a handful of governments into defying the clear wishes of their people and support our unilateral invasion of Iraq, and now that "coalition of the compliant" is beginning to unravel as democracy takes its course. It turns out that the Bush administration's duplicity has not, as many feared, gone unnoticed. Our most trusted allies estranged and frustrated, America will now have to shoulder almost all of the burden of rebuilding a country, and our citizens are no more secure for it. Well done, Mister President.
Blair Reeves's column runs Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at breeves@cavalierdaily.com.
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