Homage to the dead

[acmavm]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,3604,1168548,00.html

Leader
Saturday March 13, 2004
The Guardian

<snip>

Life stopped in the winter drizzle of Madrid yesterday. Offices, shops and cafes emptied, as funeral candles were lit in moving scenes of solidarity. Black bows of mourning appeared on shop windows, the cabs of commuter trains, and on lapels. People looking at the wreckage in Atocha burst into tears. As dusk fell, every street around the railway station was crammed with people standing in the rain. The silence was overpowering. Spaniards turned out in their millions in a collective act of grief and protest. In the Basque country, as in the rest of the country, Spain emerged from its first day of mourning with dignity. If cities across Europe were waking up to the fact that they were as much in the crosshairs of an attack on this scale, as New York or Washington were, the Israeli mass circulation Yedioth Ahronoth could not restrain itself: "Welcome to the real world", it declared unsubtlely.

But which real world? The world in which neighbourhoods are razed, water supplies cut off, children shot, in thinly disguised acts of collective retribution? Or is it the world in which George Bush uses actors to portray New York firefighters raising the American flag at Ground Zero in a £2.5m television ad campaign for his forthcoming election? Or is the world in which war is repeatedly declared but never defined and detainees are held for two years before repatriation, then rearrested, then released without charge? Are those who perpetrated the commuter train bombings to be hunted down and smoked out of their lairs, and if they were, are we confident that we would prevent the next attack, and the one after that?

Mr Bush squandered the huge wave of international sympathy which the victims of September 11 should rightly continue to receive, as Sidney Blumenthal argued in these columns. He has divided Europe at a historic time of expansion and imposed greater strains on the transatlantic military alliance than ever a Soviet general sitting in Moscow at the height of the cold war could have done. Mr Bush has made his "war" a personal and a partisan one, when the response to al-Qaida should be neither.

-MORE-