Justin Raphael: American foreign policy and the new European arrogance

Jose Munoz, a 25-year-old Spanish student, embodies all that is troubling about Europe today. After terrorist bombs sent bodies flying out of Madrid commuter trains last Thursday, killing hundreds, Munoz told The New York Times, "If it's confirmed as al Qaeda, the demonstration tomorrow won't be against [the Basque separatist group] ETA. It will be against the government." As predicted, on Sunday Spanish voters rejected the government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar that supported the war in Iraq. Even more extraordinary than the upset nature of the victory was its demonstration of the lengths to which some Europeans will go to rationalize terror.

Munoz and others in Spain and around Europe have somehow made the connection that al Qaeda attacked Madrid because Spain was part of the Iraq coalition. Days after taking to the streets in solidarity to "protest" terror, Spaniards, 90 percent of whom opposed the war, went to the polls and expressed their opinion that their premier brought it on his own people. What those like Munoz don't seem to understand is that events like those of March 11 are so heinous that consideration of their political motives or consequences serves only to justify the unjustifiable.

At the outbreak of the war in Iraq, and even as late as President Bush's trip to Britain last year, European capitals held massive anti-war rallies with pictures of Bush as Hitler. They tore down Bush effigies in emulation of those finally liberated in Red Square and at Saddam International Airport. And even after Sept. 11, when trains stopped and cities were silent in mourning, there was an undercurrent of those who thought that maybe, because of our cultural arrogance and ignorance, we deserved it.

Now that terror has come to Europe, the tune has not changed much; cause is still confused with effect. But if, as some Europeans think, what causes atrocities like 9/11 is our belief in democracy over tyranny and terror, do not the events of 3/11 confirm our faith?

To implicate our institutions and our policy is to condemn ourselves and by extension make those monstrously murdered last week in Madrid -- or in Tel Aviv, Moscow, Bali, New York and Istanbul, in some way guilty -- not innocent. Do we dare tell their families that?

I don't mean to say the United States has never done wrong. Slavery, Jim Crow, My Lai, limited suffrage and the persecution of Native Americans come to mind. Neither do I claim that the Bush administration was entirely right about Iraq.

What I do question is the attitude of Munoz and others that because Western or American ideals are sometimes hypocritical they can never be right at all. There was a time when there was a transatlantic notion of the West, of freedom, justice and peace, as something worth defending. While Aznar's Popular Party was rejected Sunday, time was, a Popular Front fought a dictator named Franco whose death squads Munoz's friends, with grandparents in unmarked graves, will not soon forget. Time was, an American president told the world, quite rightly, that the creed of a free man was, "Ich bin ein Berliner." Time was, Europe thought Israel deserved to be a nation where children can eat pizza without fear.

Yet today, much of Europe clings to a relativism that denies there is something inferior in ideas which sanction blowing up civilians on a train. There is the notion that somehow our wars and our oil greed and our capitalism have made people's lives in Gaza and Kabul so miserable that they have no choice but terror. Worse still, there is the conviction that if we only understood evil, it wouldn't touch us or wouldn't be so, well, evil. But people like bombing witness Carmen Gomez understand it all too well: "Oh, please God! This can't be happening. How could a human being do this?"

That is to say, how long will Europeans claim that Western leaders bear responsibility for the terror against their people? How long will they deny that there is good and evil in the world and that the former is worth fighting for? How long will they ignore their own history that shows freedom to be the dream of every human being? Maybe European antipathy towards absolutism is a reaction to decades under its suffocating collar. But what's worse than imposing the truth upon other people is running from it when we know it.

Worst of all, however, is the idea that if we leave evil alone, that if we do not touch it, it won't touch us; that terrorism is a battle only for those it happens to affect. Europeans like to talk about a global community, but in their rejection of Aznar and his belief that terrorism is the worldwide enemy of freedom in our time, Spaniards have, in effect, said that Sept. 11 was our problem and ours alone. Their new government promises to make that isolationist rhetoric reality by withdrawing its 1,300 troops from Iraq.

As American soldiers die in Iraq and Afghanistan to prevent others from dying in Spain, I wonder who is truly arrogant.

Justin Raphael is a sophomore American history major from Westport, Conn. Uncommon Sense appears on Tuesdays.

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