Arab News Editorial

If Spaniards imagined that their new government’s decision to withdraw its troops from Iraq would save them further terrorist attack, they have just been sharply disabused. The discovery of a sophisticated bomb on a high-speed rail link between Madrid and Seville is being linked to Al-Qaeda. First reports are that the explosive in the new bomb was of the same type as that used in the Madrid massacre — though it is admittedly commonly used in mining in Spain.

This would suggest that even if the suspects arrested so far for last month’s outrage are indeed responsible, there is another terrorist cell at work in Spain. Some Spaniards had taken comfort from the claim from an organization calling itself the Abu Hafs Al-Masri Brigades that because the new Socialist government was planning on pulling out its soldiers from Iraq, there would be no more attacks. This outfit has in the past made specious claims, for instance insisting that the last major power outage on America’s east coast was a terrorist attack when in fact it was a technical fault. Maybe its claims over the Madrid crime were also bogus.

But while the foiled attack shows that there are no safe havens from terrorism and that it does not follow any logic, there is also evidence that the wealthy and comfortable Europeans and North Americans are losing a sense of proportion about the dangers that they actually face. The dreaded dirty nuclear device set off by conventional explosives or the biological attack has to be put into perspective. While a single death at terrorist hands is reprehensible, the number of people killed by these criminals since Sept. 11 is infinitesimal when measured for instance against the number of dead from car wrecks. Three thousand people died in the Sept. 11 horrors and America understandably howled for vengeance. But six years earlier 5,000 men and boys had been slaughtered in cold blood, one by one, by Serb forces in Srebrenica and only Bosnian wives and mothers raised their voices in grief.

Before World War II there was much fear of “terror bombings”. It was predicted that cities would be flattened in days by aerial bombardment and civilian morale collapse. It didn’t happen. Some 14,000 died in the first phase of the Nazi Blitz on British cities but Britain did not cave in. Tens of thousands of Germans died in later Allied raids, but the Nazis fought on. Against such carnage, Al-Qaeda cannot begin to compare, and they are no more likely to win.

The problem is that the US has used the very real outrages these terrorists commit to drum up an international “war on terror” that is being used to cover a multitude of sins. In order to keep the momentum going, it has had to blow the threat terrorism poses to most ordinary people in the US out of all proportion.