The Reign of Spain
Caldwell, Christopher
The Reign of Spain Repelling Morocco's miniature invasion. BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL LAST WEEK, Spain undertook its largest unilateral military operation since 1939. In the wee hours of July 17,...
...Perhaps because of this, Mohamed VI and his government believe they can get away with trying to shake concessions loose from the West...
...Then Benaissa let drop in an interview with SER radio that Morocco wouldn't reinvade if Spain simply left...
...He refused...
...We're not going to invade the island with a dozen soldiers," he added, as the Moroccan flag waved over Perejil...
...Morocco and its allies in the Arab League made mighty claims of implacable irredentism...
...Spain debated simply giving up the island as recently as 1994...
...After Spain's recovery of Perejil, European Commission president Prodi said, "We continue to be worried by the events on the island"—as if the situation had been exacerbated rather than resolved...
...It promised to pack up and go home if Mohamed VI would only give a "clear and unambiguous statement" that he would not invade again...
...State Department was the key go-between...
...Fernando Arias Salgado, Spain's ambassador to Morocco, worried that Morocco was releasing a trial balloon, hoping to threaten Spain's two large African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla...
...That's not saying much, but the country does have a large, educated middle class and a semi-free press...
...The maneuver, he said, was merely an operation aimed at foiling smuggling and controlling illegal emigration from Morocco...
...They wouldn't...
...Did they have a point...
...Spain sought to resolve the standoff through diplomatic channels...
...The European Union countries, under Denmark's leadership, sought to issue a statement backing Spain's right to defend itself, but they were blocked by France...
...But Spain also would have run a big risk by doing nothing...
...Then NATO issued a communique describing the Moroccan occupation as an "unfriendly act" Days of negotiations followed, in which American envoys played an informal role, exerting heavy pressure at the royal wedding festivities...
...As is usual when the First World comes in violent conflict with the Third, the responses were asymmetrical...
...and Moroccan soldiers have taken to blocking pedestrian (but not tourist) access to Ceuta, whose economy depends on Moroccan shoppers...
...El Pais, flagship paper of Spain's left intelligentsia, warned that taking back the island would start a whole new round of troubles...
...The Financial Times, while calling Morocco's invasion "ill-advised," called Spain's an "act of folly...
...The Bush administration is interested in negotiating a far-ranging free-trade treaty with Morocco, of the sort negotiated with Chile after NAFTA...
...It captured all six Moroccans remaining on the island...
...The Moroccan minister of foreign affairs, Mohamed Benaissa, called the international press together and attempted to treat the situation as a joke...
...Yes, if you think of it as the place that Homer used in the Odyssey as the model for Ogygia, the paradise where Calypso keeps Odysseus entranced for seven years in her enchanted grotto...
...First, it requested an explanation from Morocco...
...Spain's minister of foreign affairs, Ana Palacio, reiterated that her country was ready to leave the island...
...It depends how you look at it...
...It sounded a decidedly French note, describing the standoff as an "unfortunate situation that involved two nations that are the United States' friends...
...Spain rerouted an energy pipeline from Algeria through Morocco out of neighborly spirit not long ago (and has disavowed any intention of now seeking economic sanctions against Morocco...
...Whatever the case, it violated Spain's sovereignty...
...In the wee hours of July 17, 28 Spanish special forces, backed up by four naval vessels and six helicopter gunships, reconquered the 500-yard-long uninhabited island of Perejil, part of the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the north African coast, which a dozen Moroccan soldiers had occupied for six days...
...Colin Powell said that any troops that remained on the island "would only make negotiations more difficult...
...What if next time Morocco, aiming its appeal to native nationalists, sends a much larger force, with heavy weaponry...
...Spain's insistence on continuing to claim a tiny chunk of Africa may weaken its position in negotiations over the British possession of Gibraltar, which abuts its territory...
...Spain, on the other hand, proclaimed a desire to compromise even as its troops were landing...
...Most important, Morocco is cooperating in the war against al Qaeda...
...But it has been met with unconditional support from NATO and widespread approval within Spain...
...By Friday, July 19, the U.S...
...Benaissa upped the ante in a press conference in Paris on Friday, warning that negotiations should begin on the status of Melilla...
...Spain took over those and other Mediterranean possessions at different times in the seventeenth century...
...Here is what happened...
...Spain has answered that question in spades—it will fight, and it will prevail...
...Morocco is one of the more trustworthy nations in the Islamic world...
...This request was met with derision...
...Morocco called the Spanish operation a "flagrant act of aggression...
...On the afternoon of July 11, during the wedding celebrations of Morocco's young king Mohamed VI, a dozen Moroccan soldiers landed on the island and raised their country's flag...
...But what if Morocco, aiming its appeal at the "European human rights community," decides to occupy Pere-jil with a gang of children throwing stones...
...No, if you consider that the grotto is now used as a hideout for drug traffickers and that the island is given over to goats and sheep rowed out to the place by locals to avoid paying shepherds...
...Was the island worth fighting for...
...agreement made by Spain and Morocco in 1960, neither country is to establish permanent settlements there...
...We just don't want a Moroccan politics of faits accomplis," she said...
...As such, this military and diplomatic success, though miniature in scale, is a standing rebuke to the multilateral, post-national, Kantian utopianism that is the prevailing style of European Union diplomacy...
...Spanish officials believe the king ordered the incursion himself...
...Obviously, what arose with the Moroccan occupation was a question of principle...
...Under a bilateral Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...When Spanish civil guards approached the island, they were held off at gunpoint...
...When Morocco affirmed it had no intention of removing its soldiers, Spain attacked at dawn on July 17...
...The newspaper Aujourd'hui le Maroc said the raid "revealed to the world the true face of a Spain that is dominating, arrogant, and colonialist...
...Prodi did not refer at all to the original Moroccan land-ing—an omission that rendered the Commission's statement even weaker than the one Kofi Annan issued from the United Nations (Annan condemned "all unilateral actions adopted up to this moment...
...France has deep economic ties with it...
...The Spanish government said it would indeed leave if only the Moroccans would make that same statement officially...
...This ought to raise questions among the Europeans, whose "dia-logue"-based foreign policy leaves them almost wholly defenseless against what Ana Palacio calls the politics offaits accomplis...
...This was exactly the sort of unilateral mission that "Europe," when regarding the United States, professes to deplore...
...Then European Commission president Romano Prodi and the Danish government, which controls the European Union's revolving presidency, requested the removal of Moroccan troops...
...The recapture of Perejil was a Spanish mission...
...This request was met with silence...
...the country sought no help or endorsement either from NATO or from any of its allies...
...Spain's Western allies, meanwhile, responded with a subtlety verging on agnosticism...
...He was right...
...Ceuta and Perejil have been under European rule since 1415, when a Portuguese protectorate was established there...
...That is Europe's question to answer—and the answer is shrouded in doubt...
Vol. 7 • July 2002 • No. 44
