Just ahead of European Union enlargement in May, Madrid’s ‘3/11’ has taken on the guise of Europe’s ‘9/11’ and confirmed in the popular mind that the scourge of international terrorism now affects all western countries and their allies.
While the terror attacks in Spain are credited with swinging the results of the election there on March 14, the Mount Lebanon Hotel in Baghdad was demolished only three days later – the fifth stunning attack since August that seemed designed to make that country simply ungovernable and push it towards civil war.
Since the capture of Saddam Hussein in December there has been even more disorder in Iraq. January and February each witnessed over six hundred serious attacks and five hundred ‘disorders’ – around thirty incidents and two or three deaths every day.
