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By Pedro Miguel

July 12, 2005

Original Artical (Spanish)

And the way of peace have they not known. Romans, 3:17.

In the middle of March 2003 it became evident that thousands of people were on the verge of dying in Iraqi cities, that their government buildings, schools, hospitals and the simple houses they lived in were on the verge of collapse due to bombings, and that people of goodwill around the world had failed to prevent the tragedy. The fate of Baghdadis was sealed, and there was nothing more to be done but sit and wait for the arrival of those infernal images on our television sets, newspapers and computers.

We also had the certainty that George W. Bush and his assistants - Tony Blair, Jose Maria Aznar, Silvio Berlusconi, Leszek Miller [former Polish Prime Minister] and other butchers - were not prepared to eradicate the threat of attacks like that of September 11 in the United States, but instead were on the verge of planting the seeds for a new harvest of explosions.

When the shocking massacre in Madrid took place on March 11^th of  last year, the whole world clearly understood that this was a new episode in a war that Spain had entered into against the majority opinion of its own people, and that the early falsifications made by Aznar and some members of the press did little to hide that simple fact; on the contrary, the event precipitated the fall of a government that not only made the country an accomplice to a criminal adventure, but showed Aznar to be an out-and-out liar.

[Editor’s Note: Controversy still rages as to whether the Aznar government lost the elections because it lied about the perpetrators of the Madrid bombing, or whether they lost because of the unpopularity of helping the United States in Iraq. The Aznar government initially blamed Basque separatists. Critics charge that they had hoped to be re-elected before having to admit it was Islamists that committed the crime].

The English government could have taken a lesson earned in other peoples’ blood and removed its troops from a conflict without needing to sink deeper into a complicated quagmire. But Blair didn’t, and he assured that the same kind of death and suffering was to be borne by innocent British people. Sixteen months later, 50 Londoners paid with their lives for Blair’s warlike stubbornness. But the greater tragedy, unlike what happened in Spain in the days after the March 11 massacre, in Great Britain the citizens not prepared to remove him from the office of prime minister.

Now it is Rome’s turn. If the Italians fail to mobilize themselves and force Berlusconi to disengage from the war, the roar of explosives and the sirens of ambulances will resonate in the streets of the Eternal City. Whether or not coalition troops capture Abu Mussab al Zarqawi, and even if they finish turning Afghanistan into a barren desert, capturing and killing dangerous terrorists by the thousands, if Italy does not leave the coalition, sooner or later the bombs will reveal that all roads lead to Rome.

It is the turn of Rome, of Warsaw or of Copenhagen. It is the turn, again, of cities in the United States. The leaders of the coalition defined and designed a global war, but very foolishly supposed that such a bellicose conflict would remain confined within the borders of Iraq, Central Asia or the Middle East. Like the terrorist governments of the West, the Islamic terrorists will make their cost-benefit analysis and will conclude that attacking civilian targets makes it cheaper and easier to demoralize the enemy and hinder its military objectives.

Over 2,000 years ago, Saint Paul insisted to the Romans, by means of his famous Epistle, to work toward the salvation of their souls. Today the soul is a personal and private affair, but it would be desirable for the inhabitants of Italy to throw out their government of buffoons and in that way protect themselves and others from any further bombings.