Viva Zapatero!

The incoming government of Spain under Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has indicated its intent to chart a foreign policy independent of that of the US. As reported by Reuters on March 15, Zapatero "said he wanted 'cordial' ties with Washington but 'magnificent' relations with France and Germany."

More significantly, keeping true to a campaign promise, Zapatero

indicated Monday he would pull his troops out of the "disastrous" occupation of Iraq....

"Mr Blair and Mr Bush must do some reflection and self-criticism... you can't organize a war with lies," he said in remarkably frank comments for the next prime minister of Western Europe's youngest democracy and fifth largest economy. ...

Zapatero, due to take office within the next month, repeated several times Monday his campaign pledge to pull out troops unless the United Nations takes charge in Iraq by mid-year - a shift in control that he said was unlikely. ...

"We have been very clear about the risk and the threat that we were all facing with this illegal war in Iraq, and unfortunately Spain has paid the price," Spain's likely next foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos told Reuters.

"The sooner we admit that the wrong policy has been made, the better for the future of the international community."

Those are both bold and welcome words. It remains to be seen how faithfully they can be kept when the US turns on the pressure, as it most assuredly will. The line of argument is already being laid out.

Some analysts said it could be an alarming first case of Islamist militants influencing, by violence, the outcome of a major Western election. ...

Sunday would go down in history as "the day when Islamic fundamentalism was seen as dictating the outcome of a European election," said Wilfried Martens, head of the European People's Party, an umbrella group for European conservative parties.

Now, according to polls, over 90% of Spaniards opposed their nation's involvement in the war in Iraq and Zapatero made the pledge to get out a centerpiece of his election campaign. Prior to the bombings, Aznar's party had been expected to win by a few percentage points, holding on to power but with a reduced majority. In other words, it wasn't exactly a runaway and the Socialists were already expected to make gains.

Then there was

anger over Aznar's handling of the suspected al Qaeda attack on Madrid commuter trains that also wounded 1,500 people.

After Thursday's attacks Aznar's government initially blamed the armed Basque separatist group ETA, which denied involvement.

As I mentioned yesterday, people felt that Aznar deliberately played down the possibility of an Islamic source for the attacks for its own political reasons.

So the war was unpopular, the government was losing support, it was felt the government manipulated a tragedy for its own ends, and the attacks were considered proof of the foolishness of the policy. (Gee, this sounds oddly familiar.) Yet the reactionaries would have it that unless you continue to vote for people and policies you oppose, "the terrorists win." (Compare and contrast Wilfried Martens and Rep. Tom Cole, R-OK.)

This is not only foolish, it's an attack on the very idea of democracy. Even assuming that it was the conviction that it was Islamic radicals who carried out the bombings which tipped the balance toward the Socialists, it still means that the voters of Spain - or at least the greatest number of them - have declared that they are not willing to bear the cost of continuing a policy which they oppose. That is their right as a people. (Full disclosure which I'm certain isn't necessary: I'm happy that they made the decision they did.) To suggest otherwise, to suggest that they had no right to do what they did and by doing so they have surrendered to terrorists, is nothing short of evil.

Update: As reported in the March 16 International Herald Tribune, the prowar crowd is starting to pile on Spain.

"Al Qaeda won the election," said a former conservative member of the Spanish Parliament, Pedro Schwartz....

"It's appeasement. The terrorists have gotten away with it. There's no better victory for them than in cowing the enemy."

"Appeasement," indeed "appeasement at its worst," was also the epithet of choice for Friedbert Pfluger, the foreign policy spokesman for Germany's opposition Christian Democratic Party, who also called the Spain's intention to leave Iraq "naive."

Andre Glucksmann, a leading French political essayist, charged that in just three days,

"the killers turned public opinion around. How can the murderers not come to the conclusion that they're the ones who decide and that terrorism is stronger than democracy?

"If the Socialists keep their promise to pull out of Iraq, they will be backing the terrorists' deepest conviction: that crime pays...."

He also labeled Spanish voters as ousting Aznar's Popular Party because they were "afraid of punishing the real responsible party."

Further, the Sunday issue of the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper (Germany) claimed support for Spain was "isolationist logic" which "only bring[s] shame to the victims."

I don't know if Zapatero and his party were prepared for the tsunami of vituperation from the screeching harpies of the right that they doubtless were in for, for the horrible crime of actually proposing to do what they said they would do, hopefully they were - but what I find significant here is how much of the spittle-frothed condemnations are directed not against the Socialist Worker's Party itself but against the people of Spain, who are, by these writers, ignorant, naive, cowardly, appeasers who bring shame to those who died.

It's hard for me to contain the level of utter disgust and revulsion I feel for this condescending, cruel, demeaning, insulting, evil, self-serving bull spewed out by these subhuman scumbags. How dare they!

Happily for the sake of my composure, the rantings of the bloodthirsty can be demolished with just a couple of facts which they omit - being fact-challenged being a congenital condition of the right.

The first is that, as was noted above but still generally overlooked, Zapatero proposes to pull out Spanish troops when they end their rotation this summer - unless there is a UN mandate for a UN force to replace the US as providers of security. Now, no one actually expects that to happen, which I think reveals a lot about Washington's expectations and aims. The point is, however, that Zapatero did not say Spain would have no part of Iraq, rather he in effect said that Spain would have no part of being support troops for US intentions, a significant difference. Those who insist he can't take that path are actually saying he can't contradict US policy, which sounds like a demand that he surrender national sovereignty.

Second, it omits the level of anger against Aznar's government for its attempt to point fingers at ETA and thus away from any other source before there was any basis to do so. Indeed, there is evidence that the attempt was conscious and deliberate: Foreign Minister Ana Palacio

sent directives to all Spanish embassies urging her country's diplomats to stress the ETA connection, European officials said.

"You should use any opportunity to confirm ETA's responsibility for these brutal attacks, thus helping to dissipate any type of doubt that certain interested parties may want to promote," the newspaper El Pais quoted Palacio as writing in a memorandum.

As a commentary in the Tuesday edition of the Greek newspaper Kathimerini puts it:

[D]emocracy's sacrosanct principle is that, at least on fundamental issues, the rulers have no right to lie or mislead, and they have no right to put personal and party interest above the common good. This principle was blatantly violated by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. His haste to blame ETA, the Basque separatist organization, for Madrid's gory terrorist attacks was condemned by the electorate.

Third and perhaps most importantly, all the accusations might have had some validity if and only if the bombings changed opinions about involvement in Iraq. But by universal agreement, 90% or more of the people of Spain were against the war and against sending troops. Zapatero campaigned against the war. The very most that could be said for the bombings in terms of the election is that in some people's minds they changed the relative importance of the issue of Iraq as compared to others. Considering that the Popular Party got nearly 40% of the vote, it would mean that something approaching a third of those opposed to involvement in Iraq still voted for Aznar's party despite that opinion and despite the bombings. Lacking any evidence the attacks actually caused a change of opinion - and there isn't any - the claim that the vote is an act of appeasement is not only bogus, it's contemptible.

Update to the Update: David Brooks and Edward Luttwak add their voices to the cacophany of condemnation in the March 16 New York Times. Brooks relies on the standbys of "appeasement" and "shameful," while Luttwak says he

cannot take seriously the Zapateros of Europe, who seem bent on validating the crudest caricatures of "old European" cowardly decadence. ...

The Spanish political community has failed the test of terrorism.

He also says it was "colossal irresponsibility" to have criticized Aznar's government for accusing ETA - even though the accusation was based on nothing, contradicted earlier experience with ETA, was denied by ETA, and was, it now appears, altogether wrong.

But that's the sucker logic we get from the right - sucker logic being the sort of trickery that wins cheap bar bets, that sounds good so long as you don't have time actually think about it. Brooks, for example, says that

reversing course in the wake of a terrorist attack is inexcusable. I don't care what the policy is. You do not give terrorists the chance to think that their methods work.

Now aside from the fact that neither the Spanish public nor the Socialist Worker's Party "changed course," since both were opposed to the war and the deployment from the beginning, and aside also from the much-ignored fact that Zapatero said his first priority is resisting terrorism, consider what Brooks is really arguing: You don't get attacked, there's no reason to change your policy. You do get attacked, you dare not change your policy. Therefore, you can never your change policy, no matter what.

Luttwak, however, wins the bizarro prize here.

Paradoxically, Mr. Zapatero can redeem Spanish democracy only if he repudiates the popular mandate he received and announces that there will be no withdrawal from Iraq because of any act of terrorism, Muslim or Basque.

Now, of course Basque terrorism would have nothing to do with Iraq, so it's inclusion there is stupidly irrelevant and will be ignored to avoid causing Luttwak unnecessary embarrassment.

What he's saying here is that the freely-expressed will of a people is not democracy unless it results in policies of which he approves - and that democracy is expressed in candidates campaigning on a pledge, getting elected on that pledge, and immediately declaring they will do exactly the opposite of what they pledged.

Spanish democracy needs no "redemption" from such as Edward Luttwak.

Footnote to the Update to the Update: In what was for me an unexpected development, the New York Times editorial board had this to say on the matter:

If Al Qaeda organized the bombings, as now seems to be the case, the outcome may be seen by some as a win for the terrorists. We disagree.

After saying the bombings "scrambled the political calculus," the editorial says

Spaniards who might not otherwise have voted turned out in large numbers and voted against a government that they opposed before the bombs went off. Others may have turned against the government over its early emphatic insistence that the bombings had been the work of Basque, rather than Islamic, terrorists. Either way, it was an exercise in healthy democracy, in which a change of government is simply that, and not a change of national character.

It is possible to support the battle against terrorism wholeheartedly and still oppose a political party that embraces the same cause.

I wouldn't have expected to have cause to say this, but right on, New York Times.