Check out this piece from the Weekly Standard by Christopher Caldwell on Zapatero's Spain. Caldwell is generally right, I think. Spaniards may want to read this article in order to discover what the American moderate right thinks about Spain and Europe; I would say Mr. Caldwell's ideas are pretty standard among US conservatives; they're pretty similar, though of course better-written, to what we've been saying here.

Here are the first four paragraphs of another Weekly Standard article by Gerard Alexander about the EU's "non-strategy against terror". Go read it.

IN THE WAKE of the March 11 Madrid train bombing, Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, said, "It is clear that force alone cannot win the fight against terrorism." Prodi was hardly the first continental leader to implicitly criticize U.S. policy as short-sighted and to suggest that there are clear and compelling alternatives to America's strategy in the war on terror.

Soon after 9/11 itself, French prime minister Lionel Jospin traced terrorist acts to "tension, frustration, and radicalism," which in turn "are linked to inequality," which would have to be addressed. In 2002, France's foreign minister famously termed U.S. policy toward terrorism "simplistic" precisely because it did not look to "root causes, the situations, poverty, injustice." Norway's prime minister, Kjell Bondevik, insists that "fighting terrorism should be about more than using your military and freezing finances," and convened two international conferences on the root causes of terrorism in 2003. And after Madrid, German chancellor Gerhard Schröder said that "terrorism cannot be fought only with arms and police. We must also combat the roots of terrorism."

This view isn't restricted to the other side of the Atlantic. John Kerry said in January 2003 that President Bush "has a plan for waging war [on terror] but no plan for winning the peace" over the long haul. "We need more than a one-dimensional war on terror," he went on, requiring us to "recognize the conditions that are breeding this virulent new form of anti-American terrorism."

There are only two things wrong with this line of
criticism. The United States is mounting a long-term strategy against terrorism. And Europe isn't offering any alternative.