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March 20, 2004
Steve Bell
The Spanish people have just elected a left-of-centre party to power. The Spanish elections were a victory for Spanish democracy not a “resounding victory” for al-Qaida.
It was not an act of surrender, dishonour and shame as the war party maintains. A large majority of the Spanish people (around 90%) had always opposed the conservative Anzar Government's participation in the war in Iraq. The election was a triumph of democracy, a revulsion against the political manipulation of terror by the Anzar government.
The Spanish people have every right to bring their troops home from Iraq. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the new Socialist prime minister, said they saw this to be a war that was based on deception and lies.
Will the fallout from this democratic decision result in a more independent, collective European position in opposition to a hegemonic US?
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Gary, Spanish voters are, indeed, entitled to elect a government that will bring that nation's troops home from Iraq. Democracy is not a guarantee against the adoption of stupid, shortsighted decisions.
But, if Zapatero, or those who voted for him, think that such a policy will confer upon Spain any long-term immunity to Islamist violence, then they are woefully delusional.
Moreover, his accusation that Bush and Blair lied is invidious, incendiary and just plain wrong. I guess ol' Zapa didn't hear about the Hutton Inquiry that exculpated Blair while inculpating the Beeb.
As much as it sticks in your craw, Gary, the fact of the matter is that we are engaged in a conflict of civilizations. Or, more specifically, we are engaged in a conflict over Muslim civilization, and we all have a vested interest in ensuring that the waxing tide of Islamic radicalism is beaten back in favour of those beleagured voices of Arab moderation that have yet to gain any real traction in the Middle East.
Back to the Spaniards, two Churchillian quotations come to mind.
1) "An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile in the hope of being eaten last."
I know that Gary tends to poo poo the employment of the term "appeasement" in any contemporary context. But it seems to me that this is precisely what Zapatero is attempting to accomplish with his ill-advised Euro-leftie anti-Americanism.
The war in Iraq was not "based on deception and lies," it was predicated on a valid perception of the long-term threat posed by Ba'athist Iraq, as well as by innacurate intelligence assessments in re Saddam's WMD capabilities. But, while it is convenient for the Left to hold governments and intell agencies to task for their innacuracies, no one on the Left is saying mea culpa over their own hyperbole. Don't you remember those grossly inflated prognostications of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian dead and millions of refugees?
Moreover, even Lefty cult hero Andrew Wilkie believed that Saddam had WMD stocks ready to go. Wilkie's predictions that Saddam would use them to kill untold thousands formed a major pillar of his opposition to the war. So when are you going to take Wilkie to task for his inaccuracies, Gary?
The second Churhillism that is perfectly apposite to Zapatero's ignominious volte face also comes from the Munich era:
2) "We seem to be very near the bleak choice between war and shame. My feeling is that we shall choose shame and then have war thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present."
I will conclude with a quotation from another of my intellectual heroes:
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself"
-John Stuart Mill