As citizens of the world's great superpower, we Americans can't help but look at the every world event from the standpoint of how it affects our immediate interests. A mistake we then make is to imagine that foreign actors would center their own motives around how their actions affect us. A great example has been the tendency of our conservative media voices to ascribe some anti-American motive to leaders of various European countries who have not backed us in Iraq, rather than considering their own positions and how committing to military action would affect their own governments. The newest example has been the fallout from the election in Spain.
March 11, just days before a national election, the conservative government of Jos?? Aznar had been leading its center-left Socialist rivals by a narrow margin. The people had widely opposed Aznar's backing of the United States in Iraq, but appeared ready to re-elect his party over their success handling various domestic issues. However, a terrorist bombing struck a train in Madrid, killing more than 200 people and wounding many others.
The Aznar government's initial reaction was to spend two days casting blame on the Basque separatist movement, despite the fact that Basques were never known to perpetrate this sort of terrorist act, the kind designed to maximize civilian casualties. Soon enough al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the bombing, giving the lie to the government's baseless claims of Basque culpability. The terrorists said the bombing was to punish Spain for its involvement in Iraq, bringing the subject back into the election. The conservatives' slim lead evaporated, and the Socialists won the election by about six points.
The reaction from American conservatives was that terrorists will be encouraged to commit further acts, having already changed an election result. Indeed, Prime Minister-elect Jos?? Zapatero has announced Spanish troops in Iraq will be going home, so conservative pundits have some evidence to say the Spanish are giving into the demands of terrorists. There is worry from some Americans that al Qaeda will now unleash bombings on other countries, possibly even the United States, in the hopes that they might change world governments.
It is to be expected that al Qaeda would credit itself in this manner, but it's shocking that people on our side would pay them such a compliment, too. Insofar as this may be true, nobody should be blaming Jos?? Zapatero, and they certainly shouldn't be blaming the Spanish people. Aznar's party had been running the election despite the pre-existing disapproval of foreign policy, focusing instead on economics but also on security. When it turned out rail security was so minimal that terrorists were able to bomb them without much difficulty, it cast doubt on the legitimacy of the conservative platform.
Aznar then proceeded to make things increasingly worse for himself. By engaging in ethnic scapegoating against the Basques despite mounting evidence that Islamic terrorists were to blame, the conservatives lost all moral authority. They had been saying they were more fit than the Socialists to protect the Spanish people. However, they spent the final days of the campaign telling transparent lies about the status of the investigation. Anyone criticizing the Spanish people for voting Socialist should answer a question: What were they to do? Were they supposed to vote for a government that had utterly failed them in the central issues of security, that had lost all credibility in the matter?
When one begins to consider the election from the Spanish perspective, it becomes clear that Spain is not giving in to terrorism, but seeking a new management style for fighting it. It's not as if Zapatero is canceling any investigation into the bombing and negotiating terms of surrender. Spain is just as committed to fighting terrorism today as it was a month ago. If anything, it will now focus on al Qaeda, which has actually attacked it, rather than go chasing around Iraq. What the Spanish are not committed to is a government that will pursue one course of defense policy and then lie to the people about the ramifications of it. Rather than lambasting a foreign electorate for somehow being soft on terror, all it takes is considering the matter from their perspective. This is too hard for conservatives, because they don't want their own shortcomings at combating terror to be widely considered. Conservatives would rather blame the Spanish than blame Aznar, because they certainly don't want the sort of questions the Spanish asked to become fashionable over here.
