[A-List] US imperialism: Spain, Iraq, & the 'coalition'

[Michael Keaney]

For US hawks, Madrid 2004 = Munich 1938
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, March 19 2004

WASHINGTON - For neo-conservative and other right-wing US hawks, Madrid has
suddenly become Munich in 1938 and Spain's prime minister-elect Jose Luis
Rodriguez Zapatero is former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain.

In an extraordinarily unanimous campaign, newspaper columnists and
television commentators are flooding the media with cries of "appeasement",
the dreaded epithet with which Chamberlain was permanently tagged after his
meeting in Munich with Adolf Hitler, which permitted Nazi Germany to slice
off a major chunk of Czechoslovakia.

In the hawks' view, the electoral defeat of Prime Minister Jose Maria
Aznar's People's Party in the wake of last Thursday's bombings, followed by
Zapatero's pledge to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq by July 1, marks a
collapse of will by a key US ally in President George W Bush's "war on
terrorism" that will only encourage Islamist extremists.

"Neville Chamberlain, en espanol" was the title of the featured column by
Ramon Perez-Maura of Madrid's ABC newspaper on the neo-conservative
editorial page of Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, while the New York Times'
David Brooks asked in his bi-weekly column on Tuesday, "What is the Spanish
word for appeasement?"

Tony Blankley, editorial-page editor for The Washington Times, was quick to
put a name to what he called Zapatero's "policy of appeasement" - "The
Spanish Disease" - while the increasingly neo-conservative editorial writers
at the Washington Post worried that the Socialist leader's "rash" response
to the bombings will mark the beginning of a domino effect throughout
Europe.

"The danger is that Europe's reaction to a war that has now reached its
soil," the Post said, "will be retreat and appeasement rather than
strengthened resolve," a point echoed by Edward Luttwak, a longtime fixture
of the national-security commentariat, who wrote in the New York Times, "The
Zapateros of Europe ... seem bent on validating the crudest caricatures of
'old European' cowardly decadence."

The image was starkly drawn as well by Robert Kagan, the neo-conservative
who coined the phrase "Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from
Venus."

Warning that the bombings and the election results in Spain "have brought
the United States and Europe to the edge of the abyss", the co-founder of
the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose alumni include the
most powerful hawks in the Bush administration, poured scorn on European
Commission President Romano Prodi's comment after the attacks that "it is
clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with
terrorists".

"Are Europeans prepared to grant all of al-Qaeda's conditions in exchange
for a promise of security?" asked Kagan. "Thoughts of Munich and 1938 come
to mind."

While some of these commentators conceded that Aznar might himself bear some
responsibility for the sudden turn of events - notably by trying to blame
the Basque group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Liberty)
even while evidence that the perpetrators were radical Islamists was
becoming overwhelming - the basic thrust of all their comments was that, by
supporting Zapatero, the Spanish electorate had lost its will to confront
the larger terrorist threat, just as Chamberlain had done in handing over
the Sudetenland.

This interpretation of the Spanish electorate's choice and of Zapatero
himself obviously ignored a number of factors, among them the fact that the
Socialist leader said explicitly from the moment of his victory that he was
committed to the fight against terrorism.

"My most immediate priority is to fight all forms of terrorism," he said.
"And my first initiative, tomorrow, will be to seek a union of political
forces to join us together in fighting it."

That right-wing commentators here generally ignored that vow, or refused to
take it seriously, helps illustrate their view - which they have been
hawking since September 11, 2001, with great success among the US public -
that Iraq is part of the larger "war on terrorism", as opposed to there
being two different conflicts.

In the hawks' view, opting out of one war means opting out of both - a
notion that accords very well with their "you're either with us or you're
against us" political philosophy.

But the Spanish electorate, like much of the rest of the world, clearly did
not see it that way. "In this country [the US], Iraq and terrorism are
indelibly linked in the public mind," said Charles Kupchan, a foreign-policy
specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. "In Europe, they are almost
indelibly separated.

"Indeed, there's a general sense in Europe that the war in Iraq has
certainly not advanced the struggle against terror and probably degraded
it," he added, noting Tuesday's release by the Pew Global Attitudes Project
of surveys in eight European and Arab countries that showed strong
majorities who concur on that assessment (see US foreign policy is popular -
in the US, March 18).

Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan, asserted
that, by mixing Iraq with al-Qaeda, the neo-conservatives in particular had
made a strategic error in the "war against terrorism" that is now coming
home to roost.

"Aznar, in supporting Bush on the war against Iraq, was not standing up to
al-Qaeda," Cole wrote, noting that the former prime minister's decision to
deploy troops and spend financial and intelligence resources in Iraq meant
those same assets could not be used against al-Qaeda, even when it was clear
from last May's attack on a Spanish cultural center in Casablanca that
Islamist terrorists had Spain in their sights.

"How much did Spain spend to go after the culprits in Casablanca?" asked
Cole. "How much did Bush dedicate to that effort? How much did they instead
invest in military efforts in Iraq?" In that respect, Zapatero's pledge to
refocus the war against al-Qaeda can hardly be called a "victory for [Osama]
bin Laden", said Cole.

But aside from this rather fundamental disagreement over whether Iraq is or
is not part of the "war against terrorism", the eagerness with which the
hawks have taken to comparing the Spanish electorate's verdict to the 1938
Munich agreement also betrays a basic distrust of democracy, about which the
neo-cons have long been ambivalent.

In their view, it was liberal democracies that appeased Hitler in the 1930s
and so paved the way to World War II and the Nazi Holocaust. Indeed, the
perception that "liberals" failed to fight for their principles in the 1960s
is what first alienated neo-conservatives from the Democratic Party.

The neo-cons' perception that Spaniards voted for the Socialists out of fear
of al-Qaeda's wrath confirms to them that democracy, particularly of the
European variety, is weak.

"Now all European politicians will know that if they side with America on
controversial security threats, and terrorists strike their nation, they
might be blamed by their own voters," wrote Brooks, who argued that US
voters would, in a comparable situation, rally around their president. "Does
anyone doubt that Americans and Europeans have different moral and political
cultures?" he added.

But this contention ignores the growing weight of political opinion that the
main reason for the last-minute swing to the Socialists was public outrage
with the Aznar government's attempts to withhold and manipulate what it knew
about the perpetrators for its own political advantage, as well as citizens'
opposition to the Iraq war. Such attitudes were reported by journalists
after the election in Madrid.

"In interviews," the New York Times reported, "they said they [voted for the
Socialists] not so much out of fear of terror as out of anger against a
government they saw as increasingly authoritarian, arrogant and stubborn."

That lesson might cut a little too close to the bone for the hawks who led
the drive to war in Iraq.