Spain

By now I’ve seen several dozen statements about how the Spanish are cowards, how the terrorists won in Spain, etc. I don’t think so.

The Spanish elected a conservative government for reasons that had nothing to do with invading Iraq. Then our government convinced the leadership of the Spanish government to participate in the invasion. This was extremely unpopular in Spain — something like 90% of the voters were strongly opposed to it.

At the time, someone made a prediction: all these governments that joined the “coalition of the willing” did so against popular opposition, and they will be in trouble the next time they have an election.

Fast forward one year. The heavy fighting is over, and Spanish forces didn’t take heavy casualties. Spaniards are feeling like it’s going to be over pretty soon. It looks like they’ll forgive the conservatives for getting them into the war, and reelect them.

Then the bombs go off. And the Spanish government comes up with a series of lies, each more transparent than the one before, trying to make out that the bombs came from ETA, because they’re thinking about that prediction from a year earlier. The lies collapse, and the voters are pissed off, and they punish the government for going against their wishes in the first place, and then lying to them. The prediction comes true.

That isn’t cowardice, it’s democracy. If it’s an “Al Qaeda victory,” it’s one that was set up by government getting into a war that the voters didn’t want.

Remember, it’s not our election, or our government, or our country, or our casualties. It’s another sovereign country with its own agenda, whose leaders made a bad call and got involved in our war.