I’ve had good times in Spain. Met lots of charming, enthusiastic comics fans there during my several sojourns.
And now people are getting blown up. Initially 170, and you just knew that number was going to keep climbing, and it is. I keep worrying one of the smiling folks I met are just dismembered corpses now. And even if it’s no one I knew, that certainly doesn’t make it “better.”
Yet it was “comforting” somehow to think it was Basque separatists, because then it wasn’t “our” problem, it was Spain’s. Except now, with even separatists distancing themselves from the blast, Al Qaida is claiming responsibility…ostensibly to punish US allies over the attack on Iraq. Which leads me to wonder if people who were yelling that there were Iraq/Al Qaida links are perceiving this as a good thing (“Proof!”) or a bad thing (“Oh, right, people got killed.”)
I would stop short of saying that the blood is on Bush’s hands. Madmen don’t need rational reasons to kill others. Iraq was just another excuse for the acts of madmen, who might well have committed the same atrocities in Spain while putting some other spin on it.
And yet, if it is Al Qaida, we will be blamed for it. Don’t doubt that. The Spanish government backing the US was a spectacularly unpopular move. We went into a war searching for non-existent WMDs and, a year later, Spanish civilians are being turned into pinatas with that action being cited as the cause for it. Yet another reason for yet another country to hate us.
The insanity is just escalating. Blood on our hands? On second thought, Hëll, why not. In the horror show of escalating terrorism, where the only answer for violence that so many people can come up with is more violence on top of more violence, there’s enough blood for everyone.
PAD
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