I’m more than a little disturbed by the widespread blogging to the effect that the Spanish election results represent a great victory of al-Qaeda, that they show that European countries can successfully be blackmailed by terrorism, etc. It’s particularly grating to see such commentary from Americans who, collectively, had had much less experience with terrorism on their home soil than had Spaniards before 2001.
If the Socialists were not appeasers before M-11– if a victory on their part wouldn’t have been a victory for terrorism– then the intervening act of terrorism doesn’t change that. Part of what it is to maintain a free society in wartime is to retain the ability to switch back and forth between the credible patriotic governing parties. “Don’t switch horses in midstream,” Lincoln’s re-election campaign slogan, can’t have more than prudential weight.. While I might think that Britons were wrong on the merits to throw Winston Churchill out of office while World War II was still being fought, their doing so didn’t constitute any kind of victory for the Axis. The U.S. Presidency changed party hands five times during the Cold War, with none of those representing a victory for the Soviets.
“But wait,” you say. “The British and Cold War cases are cases in which the two parties didn’t much differ on the conduct of the wars in question. The Socialists ran against the war in Iraq!”
Well, yes. But the war in Iraq isn’t just synonymous with the war on terrorism. I supported the former, and supported it for reasons closely tied up with the latter; but they’re not just the same thing. And, in any event, Spain didn’t contribute combat forces to Iraq, and the new government won’t get much of a chance to cast Security Council votes on whether to begin the war. The effective difference between the two governments will be small. Spain provided some important diplomatic support for the Iraq war, but its importance was overstated by its temporary presence on the Security Council. (Remember the dramatic US-UK-Spain summit in the Azores just before the war began– the one to which Australia and Poland weren’t invited despite the fact that they had troops on the line and Spain didn’t? All about UN politics.) And it’s entirely possible to be vigorous in the prosecution of the war against al-Qaeda while opposing the war in, and withdrawing peacekeeping troops from, Iraq.
The U.S. has withdrawn almost all of its troops from Saudi Arabia. It was able to do this because it won the Iraq war; and getting the troops out was the right thing to do. Leaving troops there to prop up the House of Saud, leaving them there to live under Saudi restrictions, and leaving them there as a constant irritant that provided new al-Qaeda recruits were all counterproductive in the war on terrorism. That means it was our judgment that our interests would be better-served by leaving, once Sadam Hussein was out of power. I think that judgment was right; indeed, the opportunity to leave Saudi Arabia was a very important ancilliary benefit to getting Saddam Hussein out of power. But al-Qaeda wanted us out, too; indeed, after the Soviets left Afghanistan but before Osama bin Laden started talking about restoring the Caliphate, his primary interest seems ot have been in getting the infidel troops off Arabian soil.
Was it ‘appeasement’ for us to leave? No. It wasn’t appeasement even though al-Qaeda wanting us out was relevant to the calculation of our interests. Neither is it appeasement for Spain to decide to withdraw peacekeeping troops from Iraq simply because al-Qaeda wanted all western troops out of Iraq as well. It’s a legitimate choice for Spain to make about where to concentrate its efforts. And if it was a legitimate non-appeasing choice before last Thursday, it remains one after.
None of this is to deny that there are policies that would count as appeasement, and political parties in the west whose victories in the wake of a terrorist attack would seem like victories for the attackers. But that would be so primarily because the parties are so far outside the reasonable range of responses to the war on terrorism that their victories would have weakened the western alliance even in the absence of such a terrorist attack. The (relatively moderate) Spanish Socialists just aren’t such a party, and withdrawing peacekeeping troops from Iraq just isn’t such an out-of-bounds policy. A party that proposed to withdraw from Andalusia and hand it over to bin Laden for the restoration of the Caliphate would be something else entirely; that’s nothing at all like what’s going on in the real world.
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