Those darn Spanish voters — they just don’t do what George Bush wants them to do. No wonder the administration often seems more comfortable working with dictators.
If you read today’s New York Times op-ed page, you will be treated to dueling hissy-fits about the outcome of the Spanish elections. Voters there — following the awful carnage of last week’s terrorist attacks on Madrid trains — threw out their pro-Iraq War government and put in power a Socialist party committed to withdrawal from Iraq.
First there’s David Brooks, who suggests that the election results constitute “appeasement,” and that Spanish voters have granted al-Qaida’s “wish list.” Then there’s Edward Luttwak, who whined, “Spanish voters have allowed a small band of terrorists to dictate the outcome of their national elections.” In a similar vein, Andrew Sullivan — who never met a conflict he couldn’t find an appeaser in — declares on his own blog, “It is hard to view the results in Spain as anything but a choice between Bush and al Qaeda. Al Qaeda won.”
So let’s look at what really happened here. Ninety percent of the Spanish people — who had to wait decades for their own democracy, until their U.S.-backed fascist dictator died — opposed Bush’s war on Iraq. The Spanish prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, decided to cast his lot with America’s war party anyway. Five days before the election, with the polls showing Aznar with a slight lead, terrorists struck.
It seemed pretty obvious from the start — given the date (2 1/2 years exactly after 9/11) and the coordinated nature of the multiple attacks, an al-Qaida signature — that this was the work of al-Qaida. But Aznar’s government, fearful of a backlash, kept insisting that Basque terrorists were to blame, even as the evidence grew overwhelming to the contrary. At best, this was a pathetic attempt at spin; at worst, an awful deception regarding a grave matter.
I think it’s pretty clear that the vote against Aznar was at least as much a final burst of disgust at this disastrous coverup as it was a general repudiation of the Iraq war. Either way, the lesson here is not that the Spanish people have suddenly become toadies of al-Qaida; it’s that, if you’re trying to lead a democracy in a war against terrorists, your first duty is to tell the truth. You can’t summon the national will required to go the distance against a devious network of murderers if you lose the trust of your own people. And if you make the kind of terrible strategic error that the war in Iraq clearly was — it toppled a brutal regime but distracted the world from the fundamentalist terrorists with whom we really are at war — then don’t be surprised if voters give you the sack.
Is the White House listening? Or did Spain’s elections just reconfirm the contempt for voters it inherited from the 2000 presidential-election debacle?