In the wake of the Madrid bombings, more democracy, not less, is thebest weapon against terrorism, argues Paddy Woodworth
Did Al Qaeda choose the new Spanish government? At the moment, this question is being asked more outside Spain than inside the country. Neither the defeated government, nor the sometimes sensationalist media which support it, are asking it, at least not out loud, though that may change. In the meantime, though, it is finding currency on right-wing American talk shows, and even in some of the mainstream US media.
When put as crudely as that, the question is easy to answer. No, Al Qaeda did not choose the new Spanish government. The Spanish people did.
But there are underlying questions which are much more complex, and which all democracies need to address urgently in the climate created by the international terrorist campaign by Islamist fundamentalists. Is fear of terrorist attack changing the way people vote? Is terrorism setting the agendas of democracies? Is the need to stay off the top of the terrorists' hit-list dictating the direction of government policies?
Let's deal with the specifics of the Spanish case first. Until last Thursday's slaughter on Madrid's rail network, opinion polls showed a clear, though declining, lead for the centre-right Partido Popular (PP). Last Sunday's election dramatically reversed that expectation, giving the opposition Socialist Party (PSOE) a clear victory.
Since the PP had a very high profile in supporting the US-British invasion of Iraq, and the PSOE has vocally opposed the war from the outset, American shock-jocks, and other more sophisticated opinion formers, say the Spanish people gave the terrorists what they wanted: a party in power which was committed to withdrawing Spanish troops from the war zone.
The facts tell a different story. The sharp swing to the PSOE was not a fearful response to the bombings, but an angry response to how information about those bombings was manipulated by the party in power. This is quite a different thing, and is a sign of a strong and vigilant democratic process, not a weak and intimidated one.
Furthermore, the perception that the PP was withholding and manipulating vital information was not born last Thursday. It had been current especially (though not only) through the whole debate on the Iraq war, where the PP insisted, like its American and British allies, that Saddam Hussein was preparing to use weapons of mass destruction against the West. Like the rest of the world, the Spanish people have been waiting for a shred of evidence to be produced for this assertion.
Given this already widespread view of the PP as a government which was extremely economical with the truth, the manipulation of information about the bombings was so blatant that it suddenly accelerated a process which was already under way. It was the government's mendacity, not the shockwave of the explosions, which drove a million or so extra voters out of their homes and into the polling booths.
It is true, however, and disturbing, that the government's decision to boost the case that Eta was responsible for the attacks, and bury the much more evident case against Islamic fundamentalists, was itself based on the calculation that the Spanish people would blame the PP for a terrorist outrage for which the party had no direct responsibility.
The slogan "your war, our blood", chanted at demonstrations after the bombings, and displayed prominently at improvised memorials to the bombing victims outside Madrid's town hall yesterday, certainly shows the depth of feeling on the Iraq issue. But a much more popular slogan on the streets was "Who was it?", indicating again that trust, and not fear, was the key issue.
Had the government been completely open and transparent about the likelihood that Islamists were the culprits, it seems reasonable to think that they might still have won the elections, as voters would rally behind national leaders after such a ferocious attack on ordinary Spanish people. Hardcore anti-war activists would still have denounced the government, but they would probably have been isolated from the mainstream.
In fact, however, the argument that terrorism will increasingly condition democratic decisions cuts both ways. It is quite obvious that terrorist acts force us to make a response, but the reality is that we always have a choice as to what that response should be. And that is where the Iraq issue kicks in again, but on another level.
"The paradox of terrorism," the El País journalist Patxo Unzueta wrote some years ago, is that "by itself it is impotent to overthrow the democratic state. But a mistaken response by that same state can seriously destabilise the system." He was writing about the terrorism of Eta, but the point also applies to the international conflict heralded by the September 11th attacks.
So far, the response of the democratic powers to the real and now terribly present danger of Islamist terror attacks has been to counter-attack. They have often chosen targets, and methods, which many democrats believe to be mistaken and even illegal.
Iraq and the Guantánamo Bay internment camp are two cases in point.
They have also paid precious little attention, and fewer resources, to the conditions which make terrorism an attractive, even morally compelling, option for many Muslims today.
In this context, I was struck by something Paul Reiderman, an EU official from Javier Solana's office, said to an American foreign affairs forum in Iowa last September.
"No cause can justify terrorism," he said, "but nothing justifies ignoring the causes of terrorism." But the most disturbing thing about the leading warriors in the so-called war against terrorism is their undemocratic contempt for open and constructive debate. "Those who are not with us are against us, and therefore wittingly or unwittingly in the terrorist camp," is a fair summary of the attitude of George Bush to his critics. It also characterised the attitude of the outgoing Spanish prime minister, José María Aznar, a man who saw a world without shades of grey, in which he was a white knight.
We may yet be grateful to the Spanish people, who in their great moment of suffering kept cool heads. They have shown understanding that our world is a more complex place than Bush and Aznar would have us believe, and that the best weapon against terrorism is more democracy, and not less.
• Paddy Woodworth is the author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy; (Yale 2003)