The Elections Are Coming. Is al-Qaeda?

From The Dallas Morning News (Opinion):

Four years ago, while working as a senior adviser in NATO’s Brussels headquarters, I got an up-close look at the way al-Qaeda’s best minds see Western elections. On March 11, 2004, Spain was rocked by perhaps the bloodiest terrorist attack in Europe since World War II, as bombs ripped apart commuter trains in Madrid, leaving nearly 2,000 Spaniards dead or injured — three days before the country went to the polls.

The incumbent party was promptly hurled out of office, and in Brussels, my colleagues and I watched as the Spanish mission began receiving drastically different instructions from Madrid. Overnight, a U.S. ally that had been an enthusiastic cheerleader for President Bush’s Iraq policies became one of Mr. Bush’s sharpest critics in the NATO alliance. A grieving Spanish electorate roundly rejected the war in Iraq, which it concluded had hurt Spain’s security, not enhanced it.

As someone who worked on terrorism issues for decades at the CIA and elsewhere, I found the most striking thing about the Madrid bombings to be the sophistication of the jihadists’ grasp of electoral timing. The bombers seemed to have been encouraged by al-Qaeda’s terrorist infrastructure in Iraq, which scoped out Spanish vulnerability weeks before the election, analyzed the fault line in the NATO alliance and concluded that a bloody blow could drive hawkish Spain out of the Iraq war coalition. That al-Qaeda in Iraq analysis was distributed on jihadist Web sites in December 2003, and their cohorts in Madrid took careful note.

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My Comment: I am sure that there are many in Al Qaeda who would love to see a terrorist strike in the U.S. days before its election. They know that this would have a major impact on how the vote will go, just as it did in Spain.

Just as the case was in 2004, security is going to be very tight for the next two months.