The Spanish Lesson - revisited

My friend Tom sends along a link to a commentary on the Spanish election.

Here's the comment from the Patrick O'Brien Discussion Forum (my comments follow):

Ain't Democracy great? Sure, I too am concerned that Al Qaeda will celebrate as a victory the last-second upset by Spain's Socialist Party, that terrorists will see their strategy confirmed and bring renewed energy to organizing further such attacks. But is it fair to blame "The Spanish" for this turn of events? All of them? Or just the 41 percent of those who voted who voted Socialist? Or just the 5-10 percent who switched their votes in the wake of Thursday's bombings and the Aznar government's obfuscations about the likely perpetrators? Mr. Bush claims to support Democracy. Well, here he has Democracy in action. An overwhelming majority of Spaniards opposed the Aznar government's course in Iraq. Until Thursday, a slim majority of Spanish voters apparently were willing to support the conservatives despite their misgivings over Iraq. Last week's events changed that. Yes, Al Qaeda has a victory. But Aznar and Bush laid the table from which the terrorists are now eating. When Democracy functions, it works by consensus. Bush and his allies rammed through an ill-considered preemptive invasion of Iraq on the basis of WMD that no once could find, against the will of the UN security council and against the will of large majorities in many democratically governed countries. Terrorists took advantage of that majority opposition in Spain, and the result is a serious blow to the coalition of the willing. Opponents of the war in Iraq do not seriously argue that it was ever wrong to want to get rid of Saddam. The question was always how best to do that. The honest argument would have been that Saddam must be removed because he was a thieving murdering gangster whose primary victims were his own people. Nor do opponents of the war oppose fighting terrorism. But those people do disagree with Bush et al about how best to win the war on terrorism. The terrorists are not some finite number of genetically evil people who can be imprisoned or killed. They are people who believe terrorism is the only weapon with which they can combat what they see to be great injustices carried out primarily by the US and its allies. Until the US addresses those perceived injustices, Al Qaeda will continue to find new recruits for the war it is fighting. I believe Al Qaeda is stronger today than it was one year ago (before the US invasion of Iraq) or two days ago (before the election in Spain). That worries me. But I do not blame Spanish voters. I blame Bush et al, for leading us into an ill-conceived unending war that cannot be won by these means.

Hi Tom,

Yes, there are lots of good points in this commentary.

I have to add another one (or two)!

I've been reading a number of articles and books lately on the U.S. "black" ops - NSA, CIA activities - around the globe over the past fifty years - mostly due to my interest in what's happening in Venezuela, and the recent documentation showing that we use an organization called NED (National Endowment for Democracy) as a front to fund opposition organizations for destabilizing and overthrowing governments that don't suit us - read: socialist governments - whether they were democratically elected or not.

I'm getting a good set of calluses about being called a conspiracy nut, because I can read declassified documentation that proves that there are conspiracies, and the big global clashes for power always seem to involve our covert operations, which have incredible budgets - some of which aren't even accounted for on any books.

My (eventual) point here is that, in the absence of a clear case for whodunnit in Spain, and the fact that, so far, three Moroccons and two Indians have been arrested, and a videotape purportedly by an al-Qa'ida-like member, who has not been identified, I am inclined to suspect that the CIA has its fingers in this one, too. In which case, I would suggest that there could have been a calculated risk that the bombing might actually increase the conservatives' chances - making people more fearful, and therefore desirous of a hard conservative government, which is what Bush is counting on here. It was not an absolute case of the conservatives winning without the bombing. Socialists are plentiful in Spain. And the fact that so many were against going to war in Iraq in the first place left the possibility that they would elect to change governments. In this case, it's just possible that the U.S. belief about fearful people choosing "strong" (read warlusting) leadership may have had a hand in creating a situation that was calculated to push the people to the right, and it backfired.

Just another possibility.

I might add that, even if the work is an al-Qa'ida type operation, it does not preclude the U.S. covert hand from being involved. There are still many unanswered questions about 9/11, and some of them involve FBI housing and funding of terrorists involved in the WTC attack, protection of Saudis, and U.S. training of mujahedin in years past.