March 18-24, 2004

pretzel logic

Spanish Lessons

by Howard Altman

As we are about to close out a year of war in Iraq -- a war that has cost more than 500 U.S. lives, untold thousands of Iraqi lives, billions and billions of dollars and, arguably, our place in the world -- voters in this country who want to see another one-term Bush presidency should take heart from Sunday’s election in Spain.

So says Carola Reintjes, director of international affairs for IDEAS, a Spanish socialist NGO and a party mate of the next prime minister. The way she tells it, Spanish voters on Sunday didn't just oust incumbent Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar.

They sent a very loud message to the Bush administration.

It happened here. It can happen there too.

Aznar was overwhelmingly voted out of office, says Reintjes, to "punish the ruling party for participating in a war opposed by 90 percent of the people and also for manipulating the media, lying to the public and exploiting people's fears for electoral gain in the aftermath of the bombings."

If that sounds familiar, it should.

While only a slim majority of U.S. citizens opposes Bush's handling of the war in Iraq (according to a recent CBS news poll), the reasons for the Spanish electorate's anger at Aznar are very similar to U.S. voter anger at Bush.

Roughly half this nation feels Bush lied about the reasons for going to war and manipulated the flow of information to justify his skewed worldview.

And that, says Reintjes, makes Bush vulnerable.

"This is one of my messages to the U.S. citizens," says Reintjes. "Vote. Vote in November and change things. Show that there is a price to pay for this lying and manipulation."

Aznar's likely replacement, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has told the world that he will pull Spain's 1,300 troops out of Iraq unless the United Nations takes control of that mess by June 30.

Reintjes says such a move will undo a misguided lurch toward Spanish hegemony.

"Aznar wanted to be somebody in the world," says Reintjes. "The only way he could think to do that was to become part of a broad war coalition. The overwhelming Spanish majority feels that we never should have attacked, that we never should have participated in an international war coalition. The only way to be somebody in this world has to be based on human values, democratic values."

Instead of being a world power, Spain found itself isolated from the majority of the world that doesn't fly the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack.

The bombs planted on trains in Madrid, which killed at least 200 and wounded more than 1,000, drove that point home, Reintjes says.

"The bombings were just horror," she says. "They brought into the minds of the people that the citizens don't want war. They don't want terrorism either, but we know war accelerates terrorism, accelerates hatred. All Spanish citizens were punished for the war policy."

And that, says Reintjes, is another lesson for Bush.

Spain has been tough on al-Qaeda and will continue to do so, says Reintjes.

"At the same time, I think we are involved in international situations that cause hatred. Our relations with the Muslim world are extremely bad. Our relations with Arab nations are extremely bad. That is very short-term thinking. There is no basis for long-term security. There is no long-term security for the U.S. and Spain. It is the other way around. It exposes us to terrorism."

Reintjes is right that the war in Iraq has provided the world no real security.

While there is no doubt that a world without Saddam Hussein is a better place, it is not any safer.

The very bad news in all of this, however, is that al-Qaeda, a hydra-headed organization that must be dismantled, scored its first major foreign policy victory with the bombings in Madrid.

While a similar pre-election attack in the U.S. won't hurt Bush the way it did Aznar, the president's prevarication probably will.

By waging a pre-emptive attack based on lies and manipulation, the Bush administration may have managed to oust a tyrant, but the shaky foundation of its war machine has been devastatingly exposed.

"They'll kill innocent people to try to shake our will," Bush said of terrorists in a CNN story Tuesday night. "That's what they want to do. They'll never shake the will of the United States. We understand the stakes."

So, too, do the Spaniards.

Bush is right about this much. Giving in to al-Qaeda is the worst possible thing that could happen, because it only shows that terror pays.

But Spanish voters, faced with a chance to reverse a decision 90 percent of them didn't want in the first place, decided they had no other choice.

Just another legacy of Bush's war in Iraq.