Why Hasn’t Spain Been Attacked Since 11-M?

The elephant powder argument applied to Spain, India and Britain.

Amy’s right. Lets’ apply the reasoning to a few other countries.

Spain:

  • Jihadist attack since 9/11: Atocha train bombs, 11 March 2004, death toll 191
  • Policy action: rapid withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq

    (an election promise, but implementation accelerated); no allegations of torture

  • Subsequent jihadist attacks: none.

India:

  • Jihadist attacks since 9/11: one certain, Mumbai train bombs 11 July 2006, death toll 209; one possible, Punjab train bomb 19 February 2007, death toll 68, mainly Muslims, responsibility unclear
  • Policy action: none that I can see; torture alleged in police investigations.

Britain:

So on the elephant powder logic, backing off (“appeasement” to the Right) works, while doing nothing and supporting the US are about equally effective or ineffective.

Winning the struggle with militant jihadism, or even just defeating the al Qaeda branch, will involve actual thought, not talking points. For now, you have to agree with OSL on the driving ideas of US policy:

Since the 11th, many of America’s policies have come under the influence of the Mujahideen.

Author: James Wimberley

James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three. I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia. James Wimberley's occasional publications on the web