The estimable Jim Henley labors mightily to tease an interpretation out of the Spanish attack/election that doesn’t involve the word “appeasement,” and comes up with the following:
1) The from-behind Socialist victory was about Prime Minister Aznar playing politics with the bombing investigation, and not about the Iraq War;
2) Except when the from-behind Socialist victory was about the Iraq War, but it was Aznar’s own fault for backing a course of action overwhelmingly rejected by his constituents.
So if you go by Jim’s second theory, we’ve all learned a valuable lesson, which is that if you’re a politician, and you’re mulling over a course of action that is right but is also unpopular, it really is best to listen to the polls. (Or to the terrorists, who, as Jim’s fellow antiwar libertarian semi-comics blogger Franklin Harris points out in the comment thread to this post, were really just giving the Spaniards an impolite but nevertheless necessary reminder as to the appropriate electoral outcome. (Yikes.)) Well, Jim, we certainly wouldn’t want politicians to evaluate their potentially unpopular policies on a case-by-case basis, or indeed to do anything but slavishly obey the whims of their constituents, would we?
But if you go by Jim’s first theory (let’s try ’em all on for size and see what fits, how’s that sound?), i.e. that this wasn’t a repudiation of the Iraq war in deference to the will of Islamist terror but an expression of dissatisfaction with the way the government was handling the investigation–well, let’s just say that some folks appear not to have gotten that particular memo:
Spain’s prime minister-elect, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, vowed to withdraw troops from Iraq and criticised US President George W. Bush after Spanish voters ousted the government that dragged their country into the controversial war.
“The war in Iraq was a disaster, the occupation of Iraq is a disaster,” Zapatero, 43, told Cadena Ser radio Monday….
…An ongoing investigation into the attacks has found growing evidence they were carried out by Islamic extremists linked to Al-Qaeda as punishment for Spain’s help in the invasion and occupation of Iraq….
…Spain’s Socialists won 43 percent of the ballots to 38 percent for the PP, largely because of the near-total public opposition to the war, Zapatero said.
Turnout was a high 77 percent, reflecting the strong emotions in the aftermath of the attacks.
Many voters had expressed anger at Aznar, who had previously announced he was retiring after the elections. He was jostled and booed at Sunday while some protesters shouted “Aznar: your war, our dead.”
Zapatero, making good on an pre-election pledge, said that barring new developments in Iraq before June 30 — the date the United States has promised to hand power over to an Iraqi provisional government — Spain’s 1,300 troops in Iraq “will return home”….
…Zapatero firmly aligned himself with France and Germany, which opposed the war from the start, in calling the invasion an “error”….
…Bush and Blair, both of whom are facing elections in coming months, need to engage in “self-criticism,” Zapatero said.
“You can’t bomb a people” over a perceived threat, Zapatero said in comments coming five days before the first anniversary of the March 20 start of the war.
“You can’t organise a war on the basis of lies,” he said, alluding to Bush’s and Blair’s insistence the war was justified by their belief — so far unfounded — that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat.
“Wars such as that which has occurred in Iraq only allow hatred, violence and terror to proliferate,” he said.
The head of the EU executive arm, European Commission chief Romano Prodi, agreed, in an interview published by Italy’s La Stampa newspaper Monday.
“It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists,” Prodi said. “Terrorism is infinitely more powerful than a year ago,” and all of Europe now feels threatened, he told the paper.
(Emphases mine; link courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.)
Hmm. The victorious Socialist candidate, the chief of the European Commission, and the average Spanish voter (at least according to this report) all seem to have done what we hawkish warblogging types have been ever-so-gently chided for, and jumped to the conclusion that this election shows is Europe’s way of showing that terrorists should not be fought, that Europe is unserious about rebuilding Iraq and preventing terrorist infiltration thereof, and that in a choice between Bush-advocated policies and al Qaeda-advocated policies, Europe is more comfortable with the latter. Don’t they know they’re supposed to wait until they hear from experts like Atrios’s wife?
Update: As it turns out, Prodi probably said that terrorism could not be dealt with by force alone, which is a little bit better. Still, why do I get the sense that the additional methods he has in mind don’t rolling up financial networks and monitoring communications and infiltrating madrassas, etc., so much as they involve Asking Ourselves Why They Hate Us and tiptoeing around so as not to wake them up (and, in all likelihood, really sticking it to the goddamn Jews)?
Postcript: Jim also joshes me for expecting too much too soon from PM-elect Zapatero in terms of getting tough on terror. Four days after the worst terror attacks in the country’s history, and here I am expecting the country’s new leader to do something about it! Easy there, tiger!
No, no, I kid. Jim’s point stems from the fact that my language was unclear: It made it sound like I wanted to see less talk and more action from Zapatero, when no one but the Flash would have had time or ability to do anything but talk at the point when I made my initial comments. What I was trying to say was that Zapatero’s acceptance-speech comments vowing to fight terror were offset, in my view, by his next-day interviews calling the Iraq War a disaster and an error, saying that Bush and Blair lied and were waging war on an entire people, and reiterating his intention to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq ASAP. (This was before I’d seen his earlier comments to the effect that he wanted John Kerry to win in the U.S. so that he and the distinguished gentleman from Massacusetts could form an “alliance…for peace, against war, [and] no more deaths for oil.” So it’s not really fair to draw any conclusions from those statements, is it.)
‘Course, I’m just one of those starry-eyed hawks who thinks that Iraq and the War on Terror are in some way related, which is a notion that has nothing to do with what’s been happening in Spain over the past week, no sirree Bob.
Post-postscript: Jim also brings the sobering news that Bob Zangas, a blogger who travelled to Iraq to help the reconstruction as both a Marine and a civilian, has been killed by rogue Iraqi cops. Normally this is the point where the chickenhawk argument would be expected against my wrongheaded bellicose warmongering, so go ahead and make it, if you’re so inclined. I’ll simply say now, as I’ve said before, that I advocate the policies I’ve been advocating out of the fervent belief that, when all is said and done, they will lead to fewer murdered Bob Zangases, not more. Until then, if you believe nothing else I say, believe me when I tell you that I feel the pain of each of these deaths. One is a tragedy. Two hundred is a tragedy. Three thousand is a tragedy. My hope is that these compounded tragedies will somehow make us act in such a way as to avoid the eventual seven-digit statistic.
Post-post-postcript: A round-up of all my Spain posts is here.