The Politics of Terrorism

If too often these days the "personal is the political," as the '60s cliché held, then the response to terrorism has also been politicized. Exiting Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar defends his government's response to the Madrid train bombings by flatly denying media reports that his ministers lied to Spaniards in a failed effort to shift blame toward ETA and away from Al Qaeda. In this presidential election year, we're witnessing more than a little demagoguery on our own soil, as Richard Clarke and others try to blame President Bush for all manner of mistakes before and after 9-11. Spaniards went to the polls only three days after 3-11 -- when tempers were hot and facts hard to come by. When Americans vote this November, over three years after the towers fell and we began our thankless task of rooting out the supporters of terrorism and turmoil in the Middle East, they'll have cooler heads and reliable information. The opposition won't find them quite so malleable as their Spanish counterparts.