As you may recall, about two years ago in March 2004, Spanish voters kicked then-prime minister José Maria Aznar and his conservative Partido Populare out of office in favor of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español. This came just days after a terrorist attack in Madrid, and soon after assuming office new Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced that Spanish troops would be withdrawn from Iraq.
Conservative pundits swung into action, wielding their usual miasma of ignorance and demagoguery. David Frum saw “swift and abject surrender to the attackers,” while David Brooks asked, wondered “what is the Spanish word for appeasement?”
As Reason's Julian Sanchez pointed out at the time, this reading of events involved getting most of the relevant facts wrong. Partido Populare's small lead in the polls was already shrinking before the attacks, and as of early March, 30 percent of Spanish voters were still undecided. What's more, the Aznar government reacted to the attacks by lying about them, seeking to pin the blame on Basque separatists even while counterterrorism experts were pointing to radical Islamists. Spanish participation in the Iraq War was, meanwhile, deeply unpopular from the start.
The pro-war left had a more sophisticated take, with The New York Times's Tom Friedman saying he understood “that many Spanish voters felt lied to by their rightist government over who was responsible for the Madrid bombings, and therefore voted it out of office.” Nonetheless, Friedman said, for the new Zapatero government to follow through on its wildly popular commitment to withdraw from Iraq -- a commitment made long before the bombings -- would be a mistake. Spain “should now follow that up by vowing to keep their troops in Iraq -- to make clear that in cleaning up their own democracy, they do not want to subvert the Iraqis' attempt to build one of their own. Otherwise, the Spanish vote will not be remembered as an act of cleansing, but of appeasement.”
Spain declined to take Friedman's advice, and having returned last weekend from a weeklong visit there I can report that the consequences of choosing appeasement have been dire indeed. Superficially, Spanish democracy is still intact and Zapatero's government in Madrid runs the country. Real power, however, is now in the hands of the radical mullahs whose will the government dares not oppose. The city of Toledo, like most of Spain, fell under the rule of Muslim “Moors” in the eighth century who referred to their Spanish possessions as al-Andalus. Toledo was one of the earliest cities brought back under Christian control (by Alfonso VI of Castille in 1085) during the centuries of warfare known as la reconquista. The modern city features a large traffic circle just outside the medieval town walls known as the glorieta de la reconquista in honor of this distinction. But today in a new ironic twist, it is from that very plaza where the Mullahs issue their fatwas that the craven Spanish government, having chosen the path of appeasement, invariably follows. Toledo's women, who only in the recent past enjoyed basic legal equality with men albeit in the context of a culture that was highly traditionalistic by American standards, now fear to walk the streets unveiled. Spain's historic wine industry groans under the crushing yoke of the Islamists' informal power, the riojas of the past but a fading memory. The Mezquita Cristo de la Luz, for centuries a church, is once again a mosque.
Actually, none of that happened. It's fake, like Howard Kaloogian's photos of idyllic Baghdad.
The Mezquita Cristo de la Luz is a lovely tourist attraction that, characteristic of Toledo's many architectural wonders, shows a distinct blending of Arabic and Medieval Christian styles. Spanish people drink tons of wine and, it seems to me, more Amstel Light than is advisable. Women walk around unveiled, though they can't wear tank tops inside the major tourist attractions run by the Catholic Church, and the Zapatero government has been moving forward on other elements of its agenda like legal recognition of same-sex partnerships, modernization of divorce law, and enhanced autonomy for Catalonia. Early in his term, Zapatero even inaugurated a new high-speed train route from Madrid to Toledo, letting tourists zip in and out of town in about 30 minutes. We should be so lucky as to have such things here.
Meanwhile in Iraq, getting out two years ago is looking mighty prescient. One can hardly remember what it was the American establishment was direly warning would happen if we pulled out back then. Perhaps it was long enough ago that the problem with withdrawal was that it would crush Iraqi liberalism and leave the country in the hands of pro-Iranian Islamists. Well, that happened. It's women in Basra who can't walk around unveiled nowadays, and Iraqi Christians who can no longer openly serve wine. Or maybe we were already in the "civil war might break out" phase of this farce.
Well, it did. Saturday's Associated Press roundup of violence informed me that “gunmen also killed three ice cream vendors in the capital's southern neighborhood of Dora, while a butcher and his son were killed and another son was wounded in east Baghdad.” On the other side, “a Sunni sheik was killed by gunmen in a speeding car when he left his home in the southern city of Baghdad” (his son, for the record, was wounded in the attack). That stuff came after 15 paragraphs of other news, including the random slaughter of six Shiites in a minibus. This roundup from March 27 had many insurgent attacks along with the mysterious surfacing of 18 corpses near Tall al-Sakher, a mostly Shiite town that seems to have taken to killing its Sunni inhabitants.
There's little new in any of this, and no doubt bad things like this would have happened even if America had followed Spain's example and recognized that sometimes even where there's a will there's not a way. But American soldiers could at least have been spared two years -- and an indefinite number of future ones -- of dangerous, pointless work. If -- or rather when -- we do finally leave Iraq, al-Qaida will indeed celebrate it as a great achievement. But spiting one's adversaries while seeking to avoid the appearance of appeasement by persisting endlessly in foolish endeavors is no way to run a country.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
