Amazingly, the Spanish government is still insisting ETA is a suspect in these terrible attacks. The media is playing right along discussing whether it's possible they might have teamed up with Al-Quaeda. All the evidence points to Al-Quaeda or an offshoot, not ETA. However, it's most convenient and self-serving for the Spanish to keep the heat on ETA to try and convince the Bush administration to start focusing the "War on Terror" on the Basque insurgency, which they haven't had any luck defeating on their own for 40 years.
I think they've seen charlatans like Ahmad Chalabi dupe the Pentagon and Cheney into invading Iraq; they've noted Israel conflating their problems with Hizbollah and the Palestinian Intifada into the "Global War On Terrorism."
Every tin-pot dictator in the world is trying to get us to believe their homegrown insurgencies are Al-Quaeda. (We're even doing it in Iraq; it can't be the Iraqis fighting us, it has to be groups from outside!)
Let's read this quote again from "Bounding the War on Terrorism" by Jeffery Record (cited below):
"Should the United States, in addition to fighting Al-Qaeda, gratuitously pick fights with the Basque Eukzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigars...Hamas and Hizbollah? Do we want to provoke national-and regional-level terrorist organizations that have stayed out of America's way into targeting the U.S. interests and even the American homeland?"
I should think not. We don't have the manpower or the resources.
One more quote that is sobering:
"A cardinal rule of strategy is to keep your enemies to a manageable number. A strategy whose ambitions provoke the formation of an array of enemies whose defeat exceeds the resources available to that strategy is doomed to failure. The Germans were defeated in two war wars notwithstanding their superb performance at the operational and tactical levels of combat because their strategic ends outran their available means..."
Let's hope the quid pro quo for Spanish support of our invasion in Iraq wasn't adding the ETA to our list of enemies.
Posted by bushmeister0
at 11:29 PM EST
Updated: Sunday, 14 March 2004 5:34 PM EST
