Necessary caveat: Regardless of the actions of the Spanish electorate, regardless of the political ramifications thereof, 200 people are dead, 1500 are wounded, and countless others are greiving. It’s still an unspeakably awful tragedy, and the heart still strains with the senslessness and pain of it. Mine does, that’s for sure.
You’re starting to miss me talking about Blankets, aren’t you?
Here are some more thoughts on Spain (for earlier installments, go here, here, here, here, here, and here):
1) The first and most obvious conclusion to draw is that al Qaeda will now begin its very own “Rock the Vote” campaign in earnest. Jim Henley points out that the motives of the Spanish electorate probably were more nuanced than “we supported the U.S., al Qaeda attacked us, we should now stop supporting the U.S.,” (Aznar’s simple reluctance to ascribe the bombings to anyone but the Basques despite mounting evidence agains this theory seemed to have angered a lot of voters, and rightly so) but when talking about the thought process behind al Qaeda, “nuanced” is the last word I’d use. These motherfuckers want to conquer the world, like HYDRA or A.I.M. for Chrissakes. They’re going to draw a lesson from this, no doubt about that, and the lesson is “murdering hundreds of people in countries with governments who oppose us will lead to the toppling of those governments.” If I were English or Italian, I’d be very worried right now. And if I were American, I’d–oh, hey, look at that! This ought to be a fun campaign season.
2) Aside from the thinking of al Qaeda, the thinking of many–not all, I’m sure, but many–Spaniards was very similar:
It reads, “Could this picture have cost 200 deaths?” And then there’s this:
This one says, “The bombs dropped in Iraq explode in Madrid.” It’s clear that a large number of Spanish voters viewed the Madrid terror murders as a direct consequence of Spanish involvement in Iraq–and what’s more, they thought that the terrorists were, all things considered, in the right! Granted, their methods were a little blunt, but the message was received, and agreed with.
Granted, these kinds of protestor images are the type the news media would invent if they didn’t already exist, but it does seem that thousands of like-minded protesters took to the streets on election eve saying just this sort of thing. Then they woke up on Sunday and said it again, in the ballot box.
3) It is also, by the way, the exact same thing being said by the winner of the election, Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. In his first post-election interview, an interview which quite frankly is beyond my worst nightmare vision of what this guy was going to do and say, the newly elected Prime Minister says:
“The war has been a disaster, the occupation continues to be a disaster. It has only caused violence,” Zapatero said in his first interview after a surprise triumph on Sunday.
“There must be consequences. There has been one already — the election result. The second will be that the Spanish troops will come back,” he said.
“Mr Blair and Mr Bush must do some reflection and self-criticism. You can’t bomb a people, you can’t organise a war with lies,” he added in a lengthy chat with Spain’s Cadena SER radio.
Zapatero goes on to say “I want Europe to see us again as pro-European, my feeling is that the election result has caused surprise but a lot of satisfaction in Europe.” “Europe,” of course, means nothing more or less than “France and Germany”–countries like the U.K. and Poland are just as firmly entrenched on the European left-elite’s pay-no-mind list as they are on John Kerry’s (whose every statement to the effect that we have no real allies anymore is a kick in the nuts of every British and Polish soldier in the field, to say nothing of those countries’ leaders). Basically you have the brand-new leader of a major European nation capitulating to about a dozen bombers, threatening to bring his troops home from a country that needs a destabilizing pull-out like it needs a SARS outbreak, saying that the election result and the horrendous violence are both direct consequences of the “disastrous” invasion and occupation, repeating the “BUSH LIED/BLAIR LIED” tinfoil-hat party line, and making it quite clear to the American people that he doesn’t really care about them at all. Just wanted to make that clear, since it’s perfectly clear to Zapatero, and the people who elected him, and the murderers who engineered that election result. (Link courtesy of The Command Post.)
4) And lest you think that it’s only Gulf War II that the Spanish thought it was a terrible idea to support (it’s always a good idea to try to leave this conflict aside, seeing as how it’s a totally unrelated neocon Zionist oil-baron imperialist project with no relation whatsoever to the War on Terror, etc.):
This is a book of remembrance left at one of the train stations where an attack took place, and the message reads “Aznar: the answer of Afghanistan and Iraq is here.” Emphasis mine. Now unless you’re maintaining regular (out to) lunch dates with Ted Rall, it seems safe to assume that the Afghan War was a direct response to the 9/11 attacks, its goal being to depose the regime that supported the attackers and capture or kill their associates and commanders. This, generally speaking, is believed even by people who think the Iraq War was an unrelated, preordained war of expansionism. And even this directly related and universally understandable use of force against Islamic fascists is unacceptable to a great many people in Spain. In a conflict between the United States and the Taliban, they’d prefer their country to not take sides. That is deeply, deeply disturbing.
5) To take that point a step further, let’s not forget that Spain was a staging ground for 9/11, and that one of the men arrested in connection with the Madrid attacks was himself a disciple of a man convicted for aiding and abetting the 9/11 hijackers. Islamic terror was a major Spanish problem long before Madrid. And Spain’s voters have now told those terrorists “Hey, man, go about your business–we’d just as soon leave you alone.” Again, take a look at a scene from the anti-government protests:
That’s supposed to be a Guantanamo Bay detainee. Just a couple of days after the Gitmo detainees’ fellow travelers slaughtered 200 commuters, the biggest outrage this fellow could think of was the incarceration of Taliban and al Qaeda in sunny Cuba. I say again that Spain sent a message not just to the terrorists yesterday, but to us as well, and the message to us was “fuck you–you deserved it.”
(All these images come courtesy of LGF.)
6) Even ignoring all the immediate geopolitical ramifications of the Spanish election results, it’s stupid for an entirely different reason: al Qaeda wants to reconquer Spain for the ummah. Tacitus has a link-rich post on this topic, which demonstrates a variety of things, including just how seriously al Qaeda takes the loss of the once-Muslim kingdom of Andalusia (Spain, of course), and just how fucking batshit insane al Qaeda’s philosophy really is (as if you needed more evidence of that). The problem, of course, is that Spain’s voters apparently recognize none of this.
I always think it’s important to rank al Qaeda’s one-world ambitions fairly low as a predictor for their actions. The organization is taking the long view, and I think that even in their most optimistic appraisals of their situation they know that a planet united under the Crescent is scores of years away. Right now their motive is primarily just to murder as many thousands of infidels as they can in an effort to punish those enemy regimes with a direct hand in the current Muslim world. But many people apparently feel that if those regimes (the U.S., India, Russia, Israel, Australia, the U.K., etc.) were to suddenly extricate themselves from the area, terrorist attacks against them would forever cease. Even a cursory glance at the theology behind Islamic fascist groups like al Qaeda (and for that matter Hamas, Hezbollah, al Aqsa et al) reveals that these groups will not stop until their grotesque brand of Islam rules the entire globe.
In essence, Spain is trying to pass the buck, hoping that a short-term refusal to engage the problems posed by Islamic facsist killers (who, I’d just like to point out, apparently feel a great deal of affinity with the deposed Baathist regime in Iraq, on whose behalf they just murdered 200 Spaniards) will result in a long-term reprieve from those killers. And this, of course, is bullshit.
The situation is different from that of Europe in the 1930s in its specifics–the countries who appeased fascism back then had only five or ten years to wait before the no-longer-satiated killers came gunning for them; these days those countries may perhaps have a good deal longer–but not in its fundamentals. Spain is trying to appease totalitarian murderers, who by their nature cannot and will not remain appeased forever. They’re still holding grudges from the Middle Ages, for crying out loud. Those grudges will not die because some quisling Socialist prime minister stops aiding the reconstruction of Iraq.
7) Is there any reason to hope? Yes, some. Glenn Reynolds links to a pair of articles that suggest that, due to internal outrage and external pressure (primarily from Ireland, a nation with a long legacy of sorrow thanks to terrorist scum on both sides), Zapatero may well take a hard line against terrorism.
Paradoxically, I think that the Left, who until this point in the WoT have primarily served as fascism’s respectable apologists and enablers, may actually have freer reign to attack terrorism than the Right does. Speaking mainly on unrelated points, Jim Henley recently pointed out that ostensibly left-liberal politicians and officials can get away with murder from their constituencies when they’re actually in power. Take a look at Saint William of Hope, Arkansas, who in actuality was an enthusiastic drug warrior who eroded civil liberties and packed the prisons in the name of the War on Drugs, who relegated gays to second-class citizen status in matters of both marriage and the military, who used government muscle to assault free speech with things like the V-Chip, and whose own actions against terrorism relegate the Patriot Act and its ilk to mere icing-on-the-cake status. Of course, nowadays the American Left looks on the Clinton Years as the kind of Golden Age with the kind of grotesquely distorted nostalgia that would earn a knowing nod and a sad but wise smile from an al Qaeda fanatic pining for the days of al-Andalus.
Of course, waging a hardcore War on Terror from the Left would, unlike most of the aforementioned, be a good thing. I myself already view the WoT from a liberal standpoint, and see it as the liberal cause of our time. Left-liberal politicians could take advantage of their die-hard constituents’ unshakeable belief that such politicians Know Best and really put the hurt on al Qaeda and their cohorts. I’m no longer one of those die-hards, but I remember the mindset well enough. If Bush cites “human rights” as a reason to invade a country, they say “Halliburton.” If Zapatero were to cite “human rights” as a reason to invade a country, they’d say “of course–and how can you possibly oppose this, you fascist?” (There are some Leftists, of the International A.N.S.W.E.R. variety, who will oppose all military action by Western governments, forever and ever amen, and who in fact did so when left-liberal leaders went after the exterminationist regime of Slobodan Milosevic. But having a more mainstream left-liberal government in power will set up an opposite pole on that end of the political spectrum, and such pro-dictator “Leftists” will once again assume their well-deserved position of ignominious obscurity.)
The fact that left-liberal pols can generally count the members of the news media among their supporters will help, too. Take a trip down memory lane and recall the news coverage of Bill Clinton’s military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan versus their coverage of Dubya’s for example. The primary difference between the two, of course, was that Dubya’s were actually successful, and yet Clinton comes off looking like George Marshall while Bush is painted like Robert McNamara. Go figure.
The thing is, though, that thus far Zapatero has shown no sign that his lip-service to getting tough on terrorism is anything but lip-service: His first major policy statement is that he’ll pull his troops out of Iraq. (He leaves himself some wiggle room, invoking the mystical powers of the UN to wave its magic wand and grant those troops legitimacy that somehow they’d otherwise lack were it not for the approval of wise and good-hearted UN member states like Syria and Zimbabwe.) Now, you may believe, bless your na