Boston.com / News / World / After Madrid, an Atlantic rift returns
Hans Blix, the former UN chief weapons inspector, who was in Madrid the morning of the bombings, said in a telephone interview last week, “If we ask ourselves, `Is the world safer against terrorism?’ [after the war in Iraq], I think the answer is `no.”’
The war in Iraq, he said, “has not abated terrorism, but in some ways exacerbated the problem.”
“Iraq was supposed to be a show of force, and, yes, that has to be done to fight terrorism. But one has to understand the political background,” Blix added. “There has to be consideration of both the military response and the political understanding of what underlies such movements.”
Robin Cook, the British foreign secretary who resigned from Blair’s government to protest his support for the war, told BBC’s Radio 4 on Monday that the Iraq war had been a “spectacular mistake” in the struggle against terror.
“What we did in invading Iraq was to help polarize opinion between the Islamic world and the West in a way that was unhelpful,” he said.
Analysts in Europe said the goal was to fight terrorism without taking measures that severely curtailed individual freedoms and democratic norms and traditions.
“The trick is to find the right balance between personal freedom and protecting society,” said Franz-Lothar Altmann of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Commentators in France, Germany, and Britain insisted that detaining people in a sort of “legal limbo” such as what the United States has done at Guantanamo Bay was not on the agenda.
Moritz Schuller wrote in the centrist German newspaper Tagesspiegel, “A camp like Guantanamo ends the risk that the people being held there will carry out any attacks, but this also means the end of the rule of law.”