In response to what Aaron had to say about the events in Spain.
Does this mean that Al-Qaeda will be possibly incensed enough to try to pull some stunt in November ’04? Possibly. Or in other world elections? Possibly. But even if they do, does that mean that they’re going to advance their goals any further? No. Will they eventually be defeated? Yes. There simply is more military might, and with time on our side, we’ll eventually get them. I don’t believe that you can negotiate with these people at all. They love death more than they love life — that’s a dangerous thing. Will bombing London, Rome, Paris, Athens, or DC cause the same reaction politically as it did in Madrid? Certainly not. There are simply too many variables. A Sri Lankan student in my J298 (“Covering the War on Terror”) astutely pointed out that in 1999, the PM of Sri Lanka suffered an assassination attempt by the Tamil Tigers, and surivived. She went on TV, displaying her wounds, and won 70% of the vote, more or less in sympathy (according to him). An American bombing of that scale would not necessarily lead to a victory for Bush or for Kerry. They’re pretty neck-and-neck, according to the polls. Bush v. Edwards? Bush would win in a heartbeat. Kerry has the foreign policy/military experience, and his point about foreign leaders wanting to oust Bush — he’s absolutely right, and anyone who thinks otherwise simply hasn’t travelled enough or talked to the right people. A similar bombing in Warsaw might have the same effect as in Spain — appealling to the leftists, and withdrawing their troops. In the end, will this matter? Probably not. The US/UK isn’t going anywhere fast when it comes to Iraq, and if anything, they’ll probably redouble their efforts to fix the country, catch bin Laden, etc.
90% of the Spanish public was against the war. To me that indicates, that they were going to have a backlash in some form or another against Aznar’s essentially unilateral action (and by this unilateral in the sense that the govt took action without the will of the people or Parliament). True, Aznar’s party by all accounts, was up for reelection — and 3/11 seems to just have accelerated the Aznar backlash.
You’ll note that Zapatero didn’t say that he’d withdraw Spanish troops and keep them there no matter what. He said he would withdraw them unless there was a UN mandate. Maybe the UN doesn’t matter much in the US, but it does matter in lots of other places. The reason why I was against the war, was not because there wasn’t humanitarian reasons to invade Iraq (no one disputes this), but because that it was based on faulty intelligence, lies, and other general untruths. As I’ve said before, had Bush said, before the UN: “Saddam poses a particular threat to the world today. Here’s why we need to invade him in the near future, because he’s a mass-murdering fuckhead. Not because of WMD. Not because he has anything to do with Al-Qaeda.” And had he been honest and made the case, I’d bet that more of the world would have gone for it. I might have. And yes, everyone is glad that Saddam is gone — but the fact is, I think that there’s something to be said for real alliances, ˆ la Gulf War/WWII — not the US, with the UK in a supporting role, and token contributions from Spain, Poland, Denmark, and El Salvador.
Basically, what you need is a real, non-partisan body (NATO/UN) to take charge and really lead the fight against terror. I agree that in the real world, this isn’t going to happen anytime soon, and the only entity who can do that is the US. But I think that part of why Europe (and the rest of the world) is so afraid of that is that they don’t want a Pax Americana, they want a Pax Universala.
If you really had a world mandate, you could have a unified front, and you could defeat this ugly enemy called Al-Qaeda. I really believe that.
To me, this is the most intelligent thing that I’ve seen about this event, from the Brooks Op-Ed:
Nor is America itself without blame. Where was our State Department? Why hasn’t Colin Powell spent the past few years crisscrossing Europe so that voters there would at least know the arguments for the liberation of Iraq, would at least have some accurate picture of Americans, rather than the crude cowboy stereotype propagated by the European media? Why does the Bush administration make it so hard for its friends? Why is it so unable to reach out?
Even more intelligent than that, is Scott Rosenberg over at Salon.
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.
