Bombing puts Spanish focus on pro-war policy

By PETER POPHAM

MADRID - Now we know the result of Spain's general election. But what cannot be known for certain is the impact on the election result of one final intervention.

Campaigning had been called off after the train attack. But nobody could stop one last attempt to sway the voters - contained in the videotape retrieved by police on Sunday from a rubbish bin near Madrid's biggest mosque, following a phone tip-off.

In Moroccan-accented Arabic, a man who identified himself as Abu Dujan al Afghani, "military spokesman of al Qaeda in Europe," said: "We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid exactly 2 1/2 years after the attacks on New York and Washington ... This is a response to the crimes that you have caused in the world, and specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there will be more, if God wills it ... more and more blood will flow ... "

Killing 200 innocent men, women and children and wounding 1500 more may be an unconventional election gambit, but the cartoonist in the Spanish daily El Pais captured the way in which, during these horrendous days, the election choices in Spain have crystallised: Maximo drew a pondering, troubled voter poised over a ballot box, making up his mind not between the Popular Party and the Socialists, but between ETA and al Qaeda.

If, as the Government initially claimed, ETA was to blame for the atrocity, it was likely that Jose Maria Aznar's Popular Party would be the gainer, rewarded for the Prime Minister's unrelenting hard line against the Basque terrorists.

But if, as now seems to be the case, it was an Islamist terror group that did it, Aznar's party has some serious explaining to do. Without Spain's involvement in Iraq - 1300 soldiers committed, the fourth biggest national contingent - those 200 people would still be alive, those 1500 others would still be in one piece.

The decision, in the teeth of the opposition of some 90 per cent of Spaniards, to send forces to Iraq will have backfired on the Popular Party spectacularly. And at the most sensitive possible moment.

Small but angry protests outside the Madrid office of the party on the eve of the election gave a hint of the backlash that could be in store. The demonstrators claimed the Government suppressed vital information about who was to blame for the terror.

Spanish electors went to the polls knowing that a vote for the PP meant a vote to stay in Iraq, and staying in Iraq meant, as the man on the videotape put it so bluntly, that "more and more blood will flow".

With al Afghani's words ringing in their ears, they could decide that the position of Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to bring the Spanish troops home on June 30 has more wisdom than they perhaps previously admitted.

The fundamental demand of Osama bin Laden ever since his emergence as a terrorist leader has always been for the West to get out of the Middle East: the US to pull out of the sacred land of Saudi Arabia, and for Israel to disappear.

From the Islamist viewpoint, the cause of ridding the Middle East of kaffirs, unbelievers, has enjoyed splendid victories: the American pull-out from Saudi Arabia, the Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, Ariel Sharon's stated aim of leaving Gaza.

If Spain's troops were indeed to come marching home, it would be another notch on the Islamist gun stock.

For other countries, it would mean the fear of more atrocities rising exponentially.

Because the tactics of the murderers will have been vindicated in spades. Their determination, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair put it, "to strike whenever and however they can," will have been redoubled.

- INDEPENDENT