En 711, des Maures musulmans d?Afrique du Nord franchissent le détroit de Gibraltar. Roderick, dernier roi wisigoth d?Espagne, est vaincu près de Cadix. La quasi-totalité de la péninsule est dès lors rapidement soumise à la domination des conquérants, à l?exception des régions montagneuses du Nord (monts Cantabriques, Pyrénées occidentales). Stoppés dans leur progression vers le nord par Charles Martel, à Poitiers, en 732, les Maures se replient en deçà des Pyrénées. Les populations rurales se convertissent à l?islam. Dans les villes, des « capitulations » garantissent le plus souvent aux chrétiens, les Mozarabes, la liberté religieuse. L?Espagne musulmane, à l?exception des Asturies et du Pays basque, devient une dépendance lointaine du califat de Damas.
 
Encyclopédie Microsoft® Encarta® 2002. © 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation. Tous droits réservés.

L?Espagne musulmane connaît son apogée sous le califat de Cordoue, qui dure jusqu?en 1031. Ses institutions très élaborées (administration centralisée, législations judiciaire et financière) contrastent alors avec le morcellement féodal des États chrétiens d?Occident et lui assurent une grande prospérité économique. Sa marine domine la Méditerranée. L?irrigation est étendue, de nouvelles cultures (canne à sucre, riz, mûrier) sont introduites. Un important artisanat urbain (soie, cuir, métaux) se développe.
 
Encyclopédie Microsoft® Encarta® 2002. © 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation. Tous droits réservés.

Zapatero !  
 
 
 
 
By John Chuckman, March 18, 2004  
 
There are a few special moments now and then in world affairs that lift your spirit.  
 
One of these came with the fall of Romania's Ceausescu, former chum of Richard Nixon, known appropriately to his own countrymen as "the Dracula." His fall was, for me, the most poignant symbol of totalitarianism's collapse in Eastern Europe. When Romanian revolutionaries waved their national flag with its center torn out, I made a small copy and posted it on my office bulletin board.  
 
Another such moment came with a speech at the United Nations just over a year ago by France's Dominique de Villepin. Behind the scenes, the U.S. had been using powerful dirty tactics to exert pressure on every member of the Security Council to approve and legitimize its threatened invasion of Iraq - a loan forgiven here, another called there, a project promised, a project withdrawn, and the Secretary General's office bugged. It did not seem possible the pressure could be resisted. But M. de Villepin spoke eloquently for the great majority of the world's people opposed to an illegal war. So when Bush started blowing up civilians in Baghdad, he was uncomfortably alone (Tony Blair counting for little either at home or abroad), and his acts were seen for what they were, a violent tantrum by America's neocons, serving no worthy purpose and loaded with unpredictable consequences.  
 
Now we have the Spanish election and newly-elected Prime minister Zapatero's words about the Iraq invasion, words like "lies" and "stupid" that are inspiring for their honesty and directness. Truth in world affairs is rare, and Zapatero's comes after three solid years of numbing, depressingly-obvious dishonesty from Bush.  
 
Zapatero has made the very reasonable demand, if Spanish troops are to remain in Iraq, that the United Nations must assume responsibility there. This is not only reasonable, it would serve the best interests of all involved in the mess the United States has made of the country - all, that is, but the madmen who created the mess.  
 
Those Americans now busy building heated, Olympic-sized swimming pools with the proceeds of new defense contracts and their political allies of convenience, evangelical illiterates who hold that a fifteen-billion year old universe was created six thousand years ago - two pillars of Bush support - will now start their voodoo imprecations about Spain's giving in to terror. Democratic nominee Kerry, almost pathetically, has joined the mumbo jumbo, asking Spain's new government "to reconsider [its] decision [to withdraw troops] to send a message that terrorists cannot win by their acts of terror."  
 
Nothing could be less accurate or demonstrate more backward logic. The appalling act of terror in Madrid rather has focused Spain on the simple, irreducible truth that the key place to fight terror is in your own country and its policies towards the world. It has brought Spain's people back to where they were before the previous government betrayed their interests to Bush.  
 
What do I mean by "in your own country"? Few Americans recall that the nineteen men responsible for 9/11 entered their country on American visas. Little stealth was involved. A twentieth man with a visa was stopped by a single alert INS man suspicious of his frightening manner.  
 
Americans forget that their 30-billion-dollar-a-year-plus intelligence apparatus failed to detect what these men were up to, even though there was some awareness of their presence. The failure is thrown into strong relief by the discovery that a large group of Israeli spies in the United States were on to the nineteen conspirators, and these Israeli spies should themselves have aroused American interest.  
 
Americans seem unaware that such simple measures as re-inforced cockpit doors and/or upgraded security inspection at airports would have made 9/11 impossible. Saying this is not hindsight on my part. After years of new threats from Western Asia and after America's hurling a whole fleet of cruise missiles at Afghanistan, these changes were modest precautions advocated at the time. A quibbling, petty Republican Congress bears no small responsibility for the terrorists' success on 9/11.  
 
No, for America's right wing, a pound of cure always is worth more than an ounce of prevention, especially where the cure involves blowing people up abroad. Chests swelled like bull walruses in mating season, they relish a demonstration of America's capacity for destruction, and, when you combine that with an exciting new opportunity for local defense contractors, it makes an irresistible legislative package. I recall a comedy skit by the late John Candy with Toronto's Second City before his success in films in which he and another comedian played backwoods types watching explosions and exchanging comments like, "That blowed up real good!" "Yeah, real good!" The skit brutally sums up the response to 9/11.  
 
You don't learn a lot by blowing people up. After killing thousands of people and destroying the livelihoods of millions of others, what has Bush learned about the perpetrators of 9/11? Not much. To this day, there is no proof that bin Laden was even involved in 9/11. His guilt has been assumed and repeated, over and over, in the American press to the point where it is taken for granted by the public. I don't deny the possibility or even the likelihood, I just remind readers that we genuinely do not know more than two years on.  
 
As for Saddam Hussein's dealings with 9/11 terrorists, we know to a certainty he never had any. His secular outlook on the world was utterly incompatible with religious fundamentalists like bin Laden. They hated each other, just as the Muslim clerics of Iran's revolution and the secular Shah hated each other. Bush and his grotesque band of armchair killers know this as well as I do, yet they have lied countless times suggesting otherwise.  
 
So I am heartened by Zapatero's step onto the world scene speaking truth. I know the silk-suited Christian warriors in the White House will do everything they can to discredit him, because his words starkly reveal the nakedness of their emperor. He can be sure the CIA will pour resources into Spain's opposition party. No niceties about democracy will hold them back, any more than they did in Haiti.  
 
As for the man who would be emperor, voters in the great American democracy get the splendid choice between Bush and a more polite "me too."

The terrorists lost!  
 
 
 
 
By Gabriel Ash, YellowTimes.org, March 16, 2004  
 
Spanish voters gave a decisive blow to the right-wing and undemocratic Aznar government, which put Spain behind George Bush's war despite the strong disapproval of the overwhelming majority of Spaniards. They also did something almost unheard of in these reactionary days. They brought their politicians to account for something these politicians have actually been responsible for. Wow!  
 
Somehow, in U.S. radical right circles, this has become "a victory for terrorists." The logic goes like this: al-Qaeda wants the West out of the Middle East. It wants to establish a tit-for-tat in blood for perceived Western attacks on Islam, a price tag, as it were, for Western policy choices. According to this logic, the price of participating in the war has now been exacted from Spain. By refusing to up the antes and rally behind Bush's allies, the Spanish voters have effectively capitulated.  
 
But the fans of the U.S. empire are confused. They also claim that terrorists are "nihilists," that they cannot be deterred or reasoned with, that Spaniards are deluded if they think they can avoid being targets of terror through "appeasement." On the contrary, their argument goes, changing policy under pressure will only make Spain even more of a target.  
 
The problem is that these two descriptions of al-Qaeda's goals contradict each other. Either al-Qaeda is engaged in realpolitik, trying to deter opponents and influence their decisions by usual (if particularly gruesome) carrot and stick methods that political realists cherish, or it is engaged in a nihilist war without end, a war that can only feed on itself until it reaches doomsday.  
 
If the goals of the Madrid bombers were to defeat Aznar, one must ascribe to them a realpolitik agenda designed to separate the U.S. from Europe. The success of such an agenda depends on some level of restraint and accommodation with Europe, as well as with any country willing to be neutral. Obviously, in order to move countries not to rally behind George Bush, al-Qaeda must be able to "reward" those who have opted out of the conflict. In that case, "appeasement," far from being pointless, is a perfectly sound policy.  
 
If, on the other hand, the perpetrators are beyond appeasement, it follows that their goal wasn't to defeat Aznar at all. If the terrorists are engaged in a merciless "war of civilization," for what purpose would they care about the identity of Spain's rulers? Isn't it then more plausible that they expected the opposite effect of what they got? They may have expected Spaniards to react in the same way Americans did after September 11. They may have expected Spain to lash out in a wave of anger against Muslims.  
 
To be sure, it seems al-Qaeda (or rather the different cells now independently using the al-Qaeda moniker) is itself not of one mind. The Madrid attack, especially given the timing, seems designed as a deterrent, but other actions support the impression that al-Qaeda's goal is to bring about escalation and to incite government to anti-Muslim repression.  
 
This is the classic gambit of clandestine resistance. Radical Islamic groups can grow and become a real force only thanks to Western violence against more apolitical Muslims, who are then radicalized by the experience and driven to join the militant groups.  
 
So far, this strategy has worked like a charm. The U.S. responded to September 11 the way Pharaoh responded to the Ten Plagues, by getting ever more righteous and abusive. Bush has made Iraq into Bin Laden's Islam's outreach slogan, recruitment center, and boot camp.  
 
There is at least some evidence that the goal of the Madrid bombing wasn't -- or at least wasn't only -- to defeat Aznar's ruling party, but rather to elicit a similar backlash of repression against Muslims in Spain, especially among the poor, illegal Moroccan migrants. Why was a central mosque chosen as the location for dropping the al-Qaeda tape (and why did the anonymous caller describe the location by reference to the mosque)? There is also something suspicious about the ease with which Moroccans have been implicated. Perhaps the terrorists were really clumsy. But perhaps a tide of anger directed towards the Moroccan minority is what they were after.  
 
Whichever their goal was, "the war of civilizations," that shibboleth of global terrorists from the Pentagon to Tora Bora, suffered a blow in Spain. To those radical Muslims driven to terrorism by the perception of being under endless attack from the West, who seek an end to Western domination of their society, the best antidote is indeed to put an end to that domination, to withdraw the soldiers, to end support for Israel, and to try, for a change, mutual respect. To those whose goal is to incite further violence in order to polarize their own societies and bring about a total war against "the West," the best antidote is to deprive them of their recruiting grounds by refusing to play their game of escalation and victimization.  
 
The reaction of the Spanish voters so far has been wise, almost supernaturally so. Both Richard Perle and Osama Bin Laden must be hissing and huffing.  
 
[Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is an unabashed "opssimist." He writes his columns because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword - and sometimes not. He lives in the United States.]