What Appeasement?

Evidence now suggests that al Qaeda carried out last week’s Madrid bombings in retaliation for Spain’s involvement in the Iraqi invasion and ongoing occupation. Before the attacks, Prime Minister Azanar’s Popular party enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls. On Sunday they were ousted by incoming Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his Socialist party. Conservative pundits, like New York Times columnist David Brooks, have been quick to denounce the Spaniards for appeasing Al Qaeda. Their arguments are not without merit, but they are overly crude and mistakenly conflate the fight against Islamic terrorism with the war against Iraq.

First the merits: The Spanish electorate did indeed switch its support from the Popular Party to the Socialists in the wake of the bombing, precipitating a shift in Spain’s Iraqi policy. Conservatives are right to point out that al Qaeda will likely view the Spanish elections as a major coup, a successful intervention into the domestic politics of a western democracy. This success could well invigorate and energize al Qaeda, and even encourage similar acts in the future.

These are troubling facts and are cause for legitimate concern. But do they justify the charges of appeasement? I believe not.

For starters, the Spanish public did not change its position on Iraq in the aftermath of the attacks; 90 percent of the electorate opposed Azanar’s decision to send troops in the first place. The majority of swing voters—those who switched their votes to the Socialists in the wake of bombings—had planned to vote for Azanar’s Popular Party in spite of its policy on Iraq.

Furthermore, Zapatero’s position on Iraq hardly marks a dramatic shift in Spanish policy, a point that has received surprisingly little attention in the press. Zapatero’s pledge to remove Spain’s 1,300 troops—which constitute less than 1 percent of the total Iraqi occupation force—by the end of June, failing a United Nations mandate, certainly didn’t win him any friends in the Bush administration. But the UN is quite likely to issue a mandate, making the chances of a Spanish withdrawal slim.

In fact, charges of Spanish appeasement are concerned less with policy shifts than with the rationale behind them. Conservative pundits are really out to make a point about national character—namely that ours is stronger than Spain’s, and the rest of Europe’s too, for that matter. As Brooks wrote last Tuesday, “today more than any other, it really does appear that Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.” The gender coding here is no accident—we manly Americans would never have folded like those effeminate Spaniards.

Appeasement implies cowardly capitulation; it suggests a policy motivated chiefly by fear. But the conservative pundits have gotten it wrong. The Popular Party wasn’t unseated by fear; it was defeated by anger—an emotion we Martians should know something about.

The difference is that Spaniards lashed out at their own government. On the eve of the election, for example, furious protestors marched through the streets of Madrid, chanting “Our Dead, Your War.” But voters were most angered by Azanar’s poor handling of the crisis. Distrust of the government had already begun to grow in recent months, as official claims that Iraq possessed WMD’s proved unfounded. This distrust only deepened in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, after Azanar assigned blame to the Basque terrorist group ETA, an act many Spaniards believed to be deliberately deceptive.

Voters were also alienated by the Popular Party’s sharp condemnation of spontaneous anti-government protests on the eve of election. And resentment only deepened after the protests received minimal coverage on state-owned TVE, Spain’s main television station, which chose instead to air an anti-ETA documentary. By the time many Spanish voters reached the polls, they were moved more by anger toward their own government than by fear of additional al Qaeda reprisals.

The appeasement charge also implies that Spaniards have chosen to elect a new government less tough on terror than the old. But when, on Monday, Zapatero declared that his “most immediate priority will be to fight terrorism,” I saw no reason to doubt his sincerity. Unfortunately, conservatives suffer from a proclivity to conflate “toughness” on Iraq with “toughness” on terror—an equation that is patently flawed.

Indeed, there is every reason to believe that the U.S. policy toward Iraq has actually undermined the fight against terrorism. The Iraqi war and subsequent occupation have forced us and our allies (like Spain) to divert valuable military and intelligence resources away from fighting al Qaeda. The recent bombings are proof that U.S. attempts to disrupt al Qaeda networks have not been successful. The utter paucity of pre-attack intelligence is particularly disheartening.

Not only has Iraq become a resource sinkhole, it has also become a breeding ground for new terrorists. The invasion managed to piss off a lot of potentially dangerous people. It has provoked strident anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and alienated us from millions of Muslims at a time when we should be most concerned with fostering good will. That al Qaeda and other radical Islamic fundamentalists should be so invested in the fate of Saddam’s secular state demonstrates just how polarized matters have become.

Sasha Post ’05 is a social studies concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.