Living In Fear Abroad

Elizabeth Scanlon Thomas

March 16, 2004 " Chicago Tribune" - This isn't Bali anymore. People in America and England are concerned when terrorists blow up tourists in Indonesia, as they did in 2002. But it's so far away.

Our sadness passes eventually if we had no friends or relatives involved. But when bombers blow up rush-hour trains in Madrid, we are gripped with a new and suddenly visceral feeling of fear. Because we know that they're coming for us next.

How do we know that? Because the terrorists have already told us. We've all seen the footage of the leaders who committed their countries to the cause of removing Saddam Hussein as the president of Iraq at the pre-war Azores summit in March 2003.

Didn't they look resolute standing together: President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of Spain.

"Many nations have voiced a commitment to peace and security," Bush said on March 16, 2003. "And now they must demonstrate that commitment to peace and security in the only effective way, by supporting the immediate and unconditional disarmament of Saddam Hussein."

That was the only effective way? So why am I worrying now that my husband will be blown up on the morning London-bound train he catches to work each day? I wasn't worrying about that this time last year. No, this time last year my family and I had recently joined thousands of other marchers in London to protest the war we worried was coming. We thought such a war would lead to reprisals. We hoped that Blair might notice that the majority of British voters didn't want to invade Iraq. I'm an American from Mississippi. We Yanks (as they still call us here) marched under our own banner that day.

But as much as we didn't want war, Spanish voters wanted it less. Almost 90 percent of them were against taking Bush's obsession with Hussein so seriously that they would join with the U.S. And look at the price they've paid.

Aznar has only lost his office; so many others have paid with their lives.

My family and I visited Spain last summer. We rode the Madrid trains to visit the Prado Museum near Atocha station where the main explosions took place. In the Prado, there is a famous dark painting by Goya that depicts men being killed by a firing squad. The look on their faces as they suffer violent deaths stays with you a long time after you see it. Surely we must have learned somewhere along the way that violence begets violence?

So this is the safer world that Bush and Blair promised us?

© 2004 Chicago Tribune"