OUR 11-M RESPONSE, SPAIN'S ELECTIONS & IRAQ

Sullywatch makes the relatively trivial point that Europeans wouldn't refer to the date of the Madrid bombings as "3/11", since they put the date first ("11-M"), but then goes on to make the much less trivial point that, for the most part, the sweeping overtures of solidarity shown by other countries in 2001 have, for the most part, not been made by Americans, including warbloggers and other conservatives, in the wake of last Thursday:

When the World Trade Center towers were felled, our papers were filled with stories about displays of sympathy for America abroad ... the band at Buckingham palace playing "The Star-Spangled Banner", displays of the U.S. flag, total strangers walking up to Americans in Romania and Africa, offers to donate blood, etc.

We wondered at the time, would Americans do this for any other country? If the CN Tower had been felled by hijacked jetliners, would we all stop to sing "O Canada"? Would we put the Maple Leaf up in store windows? Would our politicians wear Canadian-flag lapel pins?

We doubted it, and Thursday we got our proof, alas.

And this was a country whose government defied the desires of a staggering majority of its people to support Bush's war in Iraq (of course, due to said mass opposition, no Spanish troops took part in the invasion force). But of course, now that the conservative party has been booted from their majority by the Spanish people in favor of the socialist party, the situation there has changed.

The Associated Press account really tries to hammer home the point that this election turned in PSOE's favor as a direct result of the Madrid attack. This would seem to run counter to the idea I discussed the other day, that terrorist attacks can be targeted with the interest of making the targeted country more hawkish, broadening the scope of the conflict, and potentially muddying international opinion on the targeted government in the long-term. But how does that explain what happened today in Spain? Days before an election, they were attacked, and then the ruling conservative party gets its hat handed to them by the voters today. This would, at first glance, give some conservatives the opportunity to say "Hey! The terrorists want us to have leftish governments!" Such reasoning by conservatives is what motivates them to create nonsense polls like this one. So what's really going on here?

The X-factor in all this can be summed up in one word: IRAQ. The move toward the socialist party in Spain in the wake of the 11-M attacks is best understood through the guise of the Aznar government's strong support for the war in Iraq. The proponents of the Iraq war (of which there weren't many among the Spanish people) said it was an integral part of fighting terrorism (whether or not we use "war" rhetoric). The war's opponents said that it was tangential to the aim of combatting terrorism, and that attacking Saddam Hussein would not further that cause. Because Aznar, Bush and others discussed the Iraq war as being part of the fight against terror, the obvious implication was that toppling the Ba'athist regime there would make the world safer from terrorism. And the opponents, naturally, would argue that the Iraq war hasn't increased security. With the blasts in Spain on Thursday, the argument of the proponents of the Iraq war was completely undercut, and that sent voters away from them in droves.

Who's been proven right in all of this? Howard Dean. Ain't nobody gonna be givin' him no more guff for saying "the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer." Expand that sentiment to the Coalition, and he's got it.

One of the pitfalls for supporters of the Iraq war who claimed that it would make America/the world safer is that either they believed their own hype, or were confident that nothing would happen to disprove their hype. Only in a very, very long-term perspective could the plan sought in Iraq do a thing to make people in America, Spain, or elsewhere substantially safer from terrorism. In the process of diverting the bulk of war-on-terror resources to Iraq, the United States and its small group of major allies were betting that either 1) there wouldn't be a major terrorist attack in the near future to make the Iraq war seem as misguided and tangential as its opponents claim, or 2) even if there would be an attack, our people will rally around us just like they did Dubya in 2001.

Trouble is, in Spain this reasoning was wrong on both counts. The difference between 9/11 and 11-M was that the United States, prior to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, was generally a clean slate in terms of terrorism. Sure, people can point to all kinds of historical and geopolitical factors that led towards 9/11, and they'd be right. But in terms of what the bulk of the American people knew, it was a foreign policy Big Bang. The 9/11 attacks did not occur with the backdrop of a highly controversial foreign policy decision that may or may not have directly led to the attack, at least not in the eyes of the American people. Spain, because of the Aznar government's support of the Iraq war, was not a clean slate in this regard, and therein lies the difference.

So why did Al Qaeda (if they did it) act in a way that brought the left back into power in Spain? That's not clear, though whether they did it or not isn't clear either: There have been muslims in Spain for, oh I dunno, 1300 years, and that, along with an as-yet-unverified tape, continute to make the assignment of casting blame a tough one. But if an Al Qaeda group was, indeed, behind the Madrid attacks, my sense is that retaliation against a country with a pro-Iraq war government was the prime motivation here. And timing the bombings to occur just before an election? Maybe they just wanted to create chaos at a pivotal moment, regardless of who led in the polls.

TFM's Revised and Overly-Broad Rule of Al Qaeda Attack Political Goals: If country is a blank slate, to make them more bellicose. If country is already engaged, then more traditional retaliatory motivations surface.