'Fortunately, Eta is weaker than ever, and I have no doubt about its final defeat. I say this quite serenely.' These were the words of the Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar, just 10 days ago, in a valedictory interview with the London Times, writes Paddy Woodworth
They are words that may return to haunt him, as similar rash declarations on the Basque terrorist group have returned to haunt his predecessors.
Aznar is a famously unperturbable man, so much so that he walked calmly to hospital after Eta blew up his car with a massive bomb in 1995. But his serenity must have been shattered by yesterday's massacre in Madrid; on account of its appalling human cost, of course, but also because of the potential damage to his political reputation.
This is true regardless of whether the bombings were the work of Eta or an Islamic group or indeed, worst nightmare of all, the two working together in some new alliance.
There is no doubt that Aznar considered the apparent success of his anti-terrorist policy to be the jewel in the crown of his eight years in office. (He voluntarily stepped down from the party leadership last November, passing on his mantle to his own selected successor, the current prime ministerial candidate, Mariano Rajoy).
Aznar had more reason than anyone before him to believe that he had Eta against the ropes. Socialist Party (PSOE) administrations in the 1980s had embarked on a disastrous "dirty war" strategy against Eta, whose repercussions arguably gave the terrorists a broad enough Basque sea to swim in for many more years.
When Aznar's Partido Popular (PP) ousted the PSOE in 1996, he began to implement a policy characterised as using "only the law, but all of the law" against Eta. He would crack down hard, but he would not abuse human rights.
With some exceptions, he seems to have honoured this policy, despite the appalling pressure of Eta's repeated assassinations of his party's local councillors.
Under his second administration, enjoying an absolute majority, he decided to go further and change the law, banning Eta's political front, Batasuna, and a number of satellite groups.
Contrary to many expectations, the Basque Country did not explode in flames as a result, although his relations with the non-violent Basque Nationalist Party (the PNV) became poisonous.
With the help of unprecedented collaboration from France, his police moved relentlessly against the terrorists, dismantling one cell after another, foiling many attacks and capturing a number of significant leaders.
After the September 11th attacks, Aznar seized on the popularity of the war on terrorism to convince the EU and the US to back his radical judicial offensive against Eta. The price was his high-profile support for the invasion of Iraq. Which just might provide a clue to the motives of yesterday's bombers.
In the short term, however, Aznar's policy seemed extraordinarily successful in his final 12 months in office, when Eta killed fewer people (three) than in any year the group has been active since 1973.
And then yesterday it all seemed to fall asunder. The bombs in Madrid claimed twice as many victims in one morning than Eta had ever claimed in an entire year, and nine times as many as the group had killed in any single atrocity.
That, however, begs the question that no senior Spanish politician seemed to want to even consider as the shock of the bombings began to sink in.
Why would Eta have carried out an attack like yesterday's, where the modus operandi was different from its previous way?
What if it were not Eta, but some other group, like al-Qaeda, whose strategy has always embraced mass carnage?
There are, of course, a number of reasons for believing that Eta carried out yesterday's attacks. First, most bombings in Madrid over the last 30 years have been its handiwork. Second, it traditionally carries out attacks during election campaigns. Third, and most specifically, the police had intercepted an Eta unit driving a car-bomb to Madrid only 10 days previously.
The case against the bombs coming from Eta is, however, at least equally strong. Eta has traditionally made at least a pretence of trying to avoid civilian casualties, and usually phones advance warnings, although these have frequently been brutally and horribly inadequate.
The people who carried out yesterday's attacks were clearly bent on killing the maximum possible number of civilians. There were no warnings, and the bombs were place on packed trains which could not possibly have been cleared even if an alert had been sounded.
Another question is raised by the infrastructure required to place and detonate so many bombs almost simultaneously. The same Spanish Interior Ministry that told us yesterday that it was certain Eta had planted the bombs, has been telling us for months that Eta's infrastructure has been weakened to the point of collapse. Some unknown group, operating like al-Qaeda before September 11th, would have been much more likely to be able to carry out such a complex operation under the noses of the Spanish police, who were already on full alert for an attack.
The most important issue, however, is that of motive. Eta has carried out deeply unpopular attacks before - think of the callous murder of the young councillor Miguel Angel Blanco in 1996 - but nothing remotely on this scale. Its political support has already been halved by its ending of its 1998-99 ceasefire.
Many Basques who still supported Eta now do so grudgingly, and it is an open secret that many senior members of its banned political front, Batasuna, have been arguing desperately for a ceasefire. It is hard to imagine, in fact, anything that could have done the group more damage in its own heartlands than yesterday's attack.
An Islamist group, however, has many motives for a massacre like yesterday's, and especially in Spain. Aznar's high profile in support of Bush and Blair in the lead-up to the Iraq war would make Spain and Spanish citizens a favoured target, and Spain is already known to have been a hive of Islamist groups, fed by immigrants from the Maghreb who often suffer racism and discrimination.
A group fired by apocalyptic thinking does not have to consider human suffering, or political consequences. But that has never been Eta's style, something that both the US and British authorities noted in cautious statements on the authorship of the bombings yesterday.
There remains the grim possibility that Eta's leadership, cornered and debilitated, decided to make its presence felt regardless of the cost, after so many humiliating "failures". And it does seem that this leadership, isolated in exile and younger with every successful police swoop at the veterans, lacks the relative political maturity of previous generations. Such a group could have become attracted to apocalyptic thinking.
The most disturbing possibility of all, indeed, is that Eta's new leadership might have entered into some alliance with an Islamic group, as the Baader-Meinhof group did with Palestinian groups in the 1970s.
In the inevitable confusion that follows such an unprecedented event, only one thing is clear: whether these attacks represent a new departure for Eta, or the worst Islamist attack in western Europe, or both, the face of Spanish and European politics will be deeply and terribly marked by March 11th, 2004.
Paddy Woodworth is a freelance journalist and author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: Eta, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (Cork University Press)