Moral cretinism

[thebin]

story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=1&u=/ap/20040314/ap_on_re_eu/spain_elections_2

Early indications are that many Spanish voters are blaming their goverment in today's elections for the Madrid bombings, alleging that Aznar has made Spain a target for al queda by supporting the liberation of Iraq. This is both moral cretinism and sheer stupidty. It also reveals what is wrong with so many Europeans in the post-Cold War world, an inability to identify right and wrong, and appoint culpability accordingly. I firmly believe this moral cowardice derives from the fact that the US guaranteed Continental security (and thus prosperity) for the last half century rather than the Europeans doing it for themselves. We allowed them to slash their defense bugets and told them we would foot the bill for the weapons systems and forces that protected them, and they got morally fat and lazy to the point where when an enemy confronts them, all they can think of is saying, "how did WE get blamed for this? Please Mr. bin Laden, go back to murdering Americans if you will, we had no problem with Saddam! We don't like those vulgar Americans anyway. Please leave us out of this fight of liberalism vs. fanatical religous tyranny- we don't really have a horse in that race!" Many Europeans, notably of the their large centre-left, don't dwell in geopolitical reality. Don't these idiots understand that al queda hates the West because it is free, not because most of it is American-lead? The people of al queda detest a nation like Spain because of its secularism and tolerance, and even because they want it back into the realm of islamic facisms- as it was under the Moors. THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT TO BE REASONED WITH, THEY ARE TO BE DESTROYED. Yes, these people are still upset that Spain is no longer ruled by Muslim clerics, you think you can reasomn with them? They are still Editeded about the Crusades, and think that they are YOUR fault! There is nothing that sickens me more than seeing the cowardice of those who prefer to point anger away from those responsible (ie. the murderers) in some whimsical attempt to pretend that al queda is merely punishing Spain for Aznar's principled stand. Why is much of the left ready to hide from direct conflict with an enemy that would subjugate our women, execute our homosexuals, and impose religious fascism on us? Shoudn't the left embrace direct conflict with such an enemy? Of course they should, but too many refuse to accept the reality of the situation, becuase they have been spolied by decades of never having to actually fight for anything other than welfare entitlements from their governments who can afford it partially because they let the Americans protect them. Its our classical liberalism they seek to destroy. How can people seek to hide from that enemy, when it might be destroyable, and wait for it to pick up some loose nukes? We don't normally bicker about the "why" Jane Doe was raped, and who might have put her in danger by asking her to walk at night in a bad neighborhood, when we might be a bit more concerned about WHO did the raping, and removing them from society first so as to prevent the next rape. So it makes me uneasy when the BBC predictably leads their Madrid bombings story with the "we need to know who did this and why." It seems to me that asking "why" is offensively inappropriate in the hours after a mass murder.

[thebin]

www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,8966351%5E7583,00.html

Just caught Steyn's latest on basically the same topic....

nugget:
"Maybe you could avoid all that by overthrowing the Bush poodles and installing John Pilger as prime minister. But I wouldn't advise it. Before he became a born-again Baathist urging on the Iraqi resistance, Pilger's big pet cause was independence for East Timor, which seemed like a smart move at the time but has since been cited by the Islamofascists as one of the reasons they blew up Bali.

Even if you'd avoided Iraq or Andalusia or British banks or Pilger or any other affront to Islamist sensibilities, you'd still be a target. As the PR guy for the Islamic Army of Aden said after blowing up that French tanker: "We would have preferred to hit a US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels." Commissioner Keelty is confusing old-school trecordism – blowing the legs off grannies as a means to an end – with the new: blowing the legs off grannies is the end. Old-school trecordists have relatively viable goals: They want a Basque state or Northern Ireland removed from the UK. You might not agree with these goals, you might not think them negotiable, but at least they're not stark staring insane.

That kind of finely calibrated trecordism – just enough slaughter to inconvenience the state into concessions – is all but over. Suppose you're an ETA cell. Suppose you were planning a car-bomb for next month – nothing fancy, just a dead Spanish official plus a couple of unlucky passers-by. Still want to go ahead with it? I doubt it. Despite Gerry Adams's attempts to distinguish between "unacceptable" trecordism and the supposedly more beneficial kind, these days it's a club with only one level of membership. That's why so many formerly active trecordist groups have been so quiet the past couple of years. In that sense, Bush is right: It is a "war on trecord", and on many fronts it's being won.

If Islamic trecordism were as rational as Irish or Basque trecordism, it would be easier. But Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, summed it up very pithily: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." You can be pro-America (Spain, Australia) or anti-America (France, Canada), but if you broke into the head cave in the Hindu Kush and checked out the hit list you'd be on it either way.

So the choice for pluralist democracies is simple: You can join Bush in taking the war to the trecordists, to their redoubts and sponsoring regimes. Despite the sneers that trecordism is a phenomenon and you can't wage war against a phenomenon, in fact you can – as the Royal Navy did very successfully against the malign phenomena of an earlier age, piracy and slavery.

Or you can stick your head in the sand and paint a burqa on your butt. But they'll blow it up anyway.

[nychoya3]

While I understand your point, I suspect these elections had at least as much to do with the perception that PP played politics with the bombing and leapt to a politically happy conclusion without adequate evidence. Whether they are correct is another matter, but that's a VERY legit gripe if true.

[showcase]

The arrogance and sophistry on display in this line of thinking is deplorable. A significant portion of a nation still licking its wounds from a trecordist act is accused by unaffected non-citizens of "moral cretinism" and "sticking its head in the sand and painting a burqa on its butt." At the very least, this rather crass display indicates an appalling lack of timing and decorum.

But then to seize upon one line of thinking that may or may not have been influential in the outcome in order to justify one's own take on geopolitics is pathetic. The nice little strawman afforded by those who voted for change because they saw the attacks as linked to Spain's participation in Iraq both:

a) ignores the other factors at play during the election, as pointed out by nychoya3, and

b) hardly justifies decrying a vastly larger segment of an entire continent as idiots who "don't dwell in geopolitical reality." Nor does it justify the cry to:

...join Bush in taking the war to the trecordists, to their redoubts and sponsoring regimes. Despite the sneers that trecordism is a phenomenon and you can't wage war against a phenomenon, in fact you can ? as the Royal Navy did very successfully against the malign phenomena of an earlier age, piracy and slavery.

That's right - it's wholly appropriate to spin a nation's emotional response to an event just days before an election into a session of Jump Circle Defending for the war in Iraq - Steyn said so. The mere possiblity that some may indeed have voted that way is justification enough to decry the election results as some over-arching Chamberlain-ian reaction before the polling is even available to support the notion.

There may indeed be a number of 'appeasers' who voted Socialist yesterday in Spain, and if so, they are misguided - but so is, I believe, embracing the Bush Administration's "you're with us or against us" approach to the war on trecordism and Iraq. Ultimately, these issues are certainly open to reasonable discussion.

However, extrapolating from yesterday's vote in Spain to lambaste the entire European "centre-left" based on what appears to be an unfavorable outcome in what may best be described as a referendum on Aznar? Just days after a Spanish national tragedy? The title "moral cretinism" bespeaks a certain inadvertent irony.




Why the heck does the board keep changing "terr-or-ism" to "trecordism"...?
#nosmileys#nosmileys#nosmileys

[nychoya3]

Hypothetically, if there's an attack between now and November, would it be appeasment to vote for Kerry?

[showcase]

nychoya3 said:

Hypothetically, if there's an attack between now and November, would it be appeasment to vote for Kerry?

It all depends on your baseline.

If you assume that the attack was prompted by Al-Qaeda's belief that a Kerry presidency would benefit them and that this belief was absolutely correct, then yes; voting for Kerry would be "giving Al-Qaeda what it wants."

Alternatively, it could be a referendum against the Bush Administration's policy in Iraq; i.e.: "Bush took us to Iraq, unseated Saddam, and it hasn't made us one bit safer. Just look at what happened in [insert location of attack]." Or it could be a vote on whether Bush really is handling the war on Al-Qaeda well. "They attacked us three years ago at the beginning of Bush's presidency, and we're no safer now - just look..."

So it's either appeasement or a shift in approaches on the war against Al-Qaeda. At the root of how it gets labelled is, I believe, a starting assumption that change during wartime is necessarily capitulation. Either that, or a starting assumption that your enemy will invariably know what is better for it than your fellow voters.

Personally, I don't subscribe to either of these baseline assumptions, so I for one wouldn't call it appeasement. You may be prescient in speculating about an attack timed to coincide with the November elections - who knows, maybe Al-Qaeda will be emboldened by the outcome in Spain. That being said, I woudn't think Al-Qaeda would overplay its hand that way; adopting the "conventional" wisdom that a second Bush term would be anathema to Al-Qaeda, I can't imagine an outcome following an October attack as anything short of a Bush landslide - hence, an attack would appear to be counter-productive.

[thebin]

nychoya3 said:

Hypothetically, if there's an attack between now and November, would it be appeasment to vote for Kerry?

the answer, of course, is....it depends. If Bush were leading Kerry beyond the margin of record only a few days before the election, and then there
was a massive attack, and then, as a direct result, there was a mobilization of people who were not going to vote to begin with who decide to vote for Kerry because Bush seems to have really angered the murderers....then YES. Those people would be voting to appease trecordists. Which is essentially what happened in Spain according to every Spanish political expert and newspaper the BBC could dig up. (See below link.) But not the people who were going to vote and going to vote for Kerry regardless- I would not call them appeasers by any stretch. And this question is I think extremely academic because Americans would never do this anyway.
This is a move that could not conceviebly happen in the US IMO. The outcome of the shift in public opinion is something that I think could only happen in a Europe that has not had to defend itself in ahalf century and truly believes we are at the End of History. Bizarrely, the don't seem to take al Queda at its word- who want Andalusia back under the Caliphate and all Christians subjugated. Peruse what the Spanish dailies have said, both from right and left,there is no doubt at all that the bombings and subsequent understanding
that they were almost certainly Al Queda-inspired at least, is what put the Socialists back in power because the PP took too confrontational a
stance with Arabs in general by backing Bush. This was an election decided on that one single
issue only. WITHOUT QUESTION, this is exactly what the murderers wanted to accomplish. I don't think reasonable people can disagree about that. You might say that you think the Socialists are good for Spain AND its what the murderers wanted at the same time, but it is by any admission, TrecordISM's most stunning policy succes. Bin Laden can claim to have overthrown a western democratic government and replaced it with a more timid one through acts of murder. Wonderful. The people who havevoted for Socilaists have made trecordism a more viable policy tool this week. You might not like hearing that but it is flat out true on the face of the facts. Oh, and on an ancillary note, they have returned to power the Socilaists that once devastated the nation's economy after the last 8 years of unprecendented Spanish prosperity. I work with several traders on the Emerging Markets desk at Merrill- several of them Spanish and Latin Americans- who have a far closer relationship with Spain than you might imagine. To a man (actually a woman was the most vocal) said they were mortified that Spain had done this for two reasons: its cowardice in encouragin more trecordism especially before elections in allied countries and they fear for what the Socialists will do with their economy.

bbc
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3512248.stm (roundup of Spanish
dailies)

NRO's Eurpress review:

March 15, 2004, 8:23 a.m.
The Spanish Apology
The results of Sunday's election in Spain, in which the pro-American
Popular
party was voted out of office in an upset by a Socialist party
profoundly at
odds with American policy in Iraq and elsewhere, doesn't leave much
room for
interpretation. Economics wasn't the issue. Job creation and education
weren't topics of widespread debate. The war in Iraq, which the
conservative
Aznar government strongly supported, despite the overwhelming
opposition of
most Spaniards, had largely evaporated as a factor in the polls before
the
voting. Not even the horrible trecord attacks of Thursday did much to
change
voters' minds.
The thing that made the difference to Spanish voters was the growing
apprehension that al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks. In the
first few
hours after the atrocity, homegrown ETA trecordists were blamed by the
government for the attacks. If true, this would have strengthened the
government's strong antitrecordist position. But subsequent evidence of
possible al Qaeda involvement - evidence mostly unverified and still
under
investigation - was used by the Socialists in noisy street
demonstrations
supported by Spain's left-wing press as proof that al Qaeda was
targeting
Spain because of its support of the U.S. in Iraq and that the
government had
lied in claiming the ETA was the culprit, despite the fact that
potential
Arab involvement had been discovered by the outgoing government. BBC
reports
from Madrid cast the election as a referendum not just on the war, but
on
whether or not Spanish voters were willing to face the consequences of
joining the war on trecordism.
They were not. Spanish voters went to the polls to apologize for their
government's actions. There was no other issue on the ballot. The
results
bode ill for America's antitrecordism campaign. As the Daily Telegraph
reports
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$KDHT1POWJZBCTQFIQMFCF
FOAVCBQYIV0?xml=/news/2004/03/15/welec15.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/03/15/ixpor
taltop.html> today, the new Spanish prime minister has signaled his
desire
to move away from the U.S.; withdrawing troops from the Coalition in
Iraq
was one of the Socialists' main campaign promises, and indeed, it was
one of
the first acts announced by the new government. By the time you have
lunch
today, reports <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3512144.stm>
the BBC
with some satisfaction, Spanish troops will be packing their bags to go
home.
But the reaction in the left-wing European press is predictable. The
Guardian had already sounded the note the night before the elections in
an
editorial
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/spain/article/0,2763,1168594,00.html>
that reflected the Spanish mood accurately: "We need to take the fight
against trecord out of America's hands. We need to get beyond the them
and
us, the good guys and the bad guys, and seek a genuinely collective
response. Europe should seize the moment that America failed to grasp."
As
Spain's left-wing El Pais celebrated <http://www.elpais.es/> the
Socialists'
"unprecedented" victory, in Libération, the defeat was seen
<http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=186103> as the price of
Aznar's
"lies" about al Qaeda culpability. Suddeutsche Zeitung told
<http://www.sueddeutsche.de/ausland/artikel/468/28440/> readers that
Aznar
was being punished for supporting America's antitrecordism policies in
Iraq
and elsewhere. In the Independent, Robert Fisk reminded
<http://www.independent.co.uk> his readers that "The West was warned."
He's
not referring to September 11, of course.
The ultimate wisdom of allowing al Qaeda trecordism to determine
national
elections is still to be seen. But as the Socialists in Spain get
"beyond
the them and us, the good guys and the bad guys," and attempt to find
the
common ground they have with whomever killed 200 innocent citizens and
wounded 1,400 others, that country's apology for supporting the war on
trecordism will be heard with appreciation by al Qaeda - and ETA, the
IRA,
Hamas, and every other trecordist organization in the world.

[thebin]

www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;$sessionid$PSL1MLPN2Q02HQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/opinion/2004/03/16/do1602.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/03/16/ixopinion.html

nugget:

"At the end of last week, American friends kept saying to me: "3/11 is Europe's 9/11. They get it now." I expressed scepticism. And I very much doubt whether March 11 will be a day that will live in infamy. Rather, March 14 seems likely to be the date bequeathed to posterity, in the way we remember those grim markers on the road to conflagration through the 1930s, the tactical surrenders that made disaster inevitable. All those umbrellas in the rain at Friday's marches proved to be pretty pictures for the cameras, nothing more. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the slain. In the three days between the slaughter and the vote, it was widely reported that the atrocity had been designed to influence the election. In allowing it to do so, the Spanish knowingly made Sunday a victory for appeasement and dishonoured their own dead.

And, if it works in Spain, why not in Australia, Britain, Italy, Poland? In his 1996 "Declaration of War Against the Americans", Bin Laden cited Washington's feebleness in the face of the 1992 Aden hotel bombings and the Black Hawk Down business in Somalia in 1993: "You have been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew," he wrote. "The extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear." To the jihadis' way of thinking, on Thursday, the Spaniards were disgraced by Allah; on Sunday, they withdrew. The extent of their impotence and weaknesses is very clear."

[showcase]

I have two thoughts about this "Spain capitulated to Al-Qaeda" assessment of Sunday's vote.

First, it appears that you're d@mned if you do and you're d@mned if you don't.

As I see it, any attack close to an election will "influence it" - the resulting vote will be reactionary and emotional, one way or another. Either you react by allowing the attack to galvanize your feeling that the ruling party has sinned by commission or omission and/or brought this attack down on you in doing so, or you react by deciding that the ruling party is doing the best it can and/or that you won't give the attackers the satisfaction, no matter what the future consequences of continuing the current regime. Al-Qaeda and their ilk will draw whatever lessons they want to - perhaps the next electorally-targeted attack will use manipulation by reverse psychology, selecting the nation and nature of attack in order to play on the nation's psyche such that the candidate perceived as the weaker leader emerges, whether it is the incumbent or not. Maybe Al-Qaeda will decide that Bush is doing so uneven a job against them that they SHOULD attack in October, banking on the predicatable American response to such an insult.

In the end, I see this talk of appeasement as pretty specious. One person's capitulation to trecordists is another person's decision to replace Gen. McClellan as Commander of the Army of the Potomac (hoping, of course, that whomever will succeed the ousted leader will fare better than Burnside did). It's all relative, and efforts to demonstrate conclusively that yesterday's vote in Spain is appeasement pure and simple ring hollow, in my opinion. Appeasement is not in the eye of the contemporaneous beholder, it is in the actions of the elected leader in the years following his election.

Look at it this way: Zapatero's decision to withdraw Spanish participation by June unless there's a change in how the Iraq war is being handled is hardly emblematic of Spanish voters going to the polls to apologize for their
government's actions, as one of the pieces linked by 'bin would portray it. Rather, it simply reflects a change in how things are going to proceed. Perhaps the Spanish really will tuck tail and run in the war on trecordism, but it's pure speculation to say at this point that they have.

Second, there is no doubting that Al-Qaeda will derive a great deal of satisfaction in the wake of this, if indeed Osama somehow masterminded it from the caves of Pakistan (although this would belie the assertions by many that he's a non-factor in his current state). On the other hand, perhaps we should look a bit beyond the election to see what it was that laid the groundwork for the schism that the Madrid attacks were intended to exploit - the division over the war in Iraq.* In a sense, the Administration's mishandling of the diplomatic process in the run-up to Iraq played as significant a role in the outcome as the purported Spanish 'appeasers' - Al-Qaeda exploited an opportunity that was dealt to it by the ham-fisted, darn-the-consequences diplomacy embraced by the Chaney/Rumsfeld neocons in the Administration.



*NOTE: Although I would have thought this would be obvious, I want to make clear from the outset that IN NO WAY AM I POSTULATING THAT THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS SOMEHOW TO BLAME FOR MADRID. THE ATTACK IS CLEARLY A WORK OF TER-RORISM, PURE AND SIMPLE. I'M SIMPLY THEORIZING THAT THE ATTACKERS, WHO WOULD ATTACK ANYWAY, MAY HAVE SEIZED UPON A WAY IN WHICH TO AMPLIFY THE REPRECUSSIONS OF THEIR ATTACK.

[thebin]

Someone who has had his differences with Mark Steyn, who also writes for the politically eclectic Spectator (UK) and who is familiar with Spanish politics....
I think this article, written by someone on the scene for the transformation, gives credence to the idea, put forward I think by the Wall St Journal op ed, that democracy would have been best served if the election were pushed back a week or two to let emotions settle themselves and produce the most rational post-trajedy decision. That would have been a minor victory for Al Queda. Instead, they got a massive victory.

www.spectator.co.uk/v3_entry_frames.htm

in part:


"Looking back, I should have seen the early signs. Many of my fellow marchers, especially the youngsters, wore badges with the slogan ‘No to trecordism, no to the war’. Although 11-M had indeed made people more likely to vote, it was a mistake to assume that they would vote against appeasement.

By the next day, eve of poll, the dignity and unity which had characterised the vigils broke down altogether. Crowds gathered outside the PP offices in Madrid and some provincial cities. ‘Before we vote, we want to know the truth,’ they chanted. As their numbers swelled, the mood turned ugly. ‘Se nota, se siente, el Gobierno miente!’ they carolled, falling into the favourite rhythm of Spanish crowds. Then, disgracefully, the cry turned to ‘Asesinos!’

At this stage, the PP made a mistake. Its prime ministerial candidate, Mariano Rajoy, who pulls off the extraordinary feat of being even less charismatic than Mr Aznar, appeared on television. These demonstrations were illegal, he said pompously, and the crowds had been stirred up by parties whom he did not wish to name. He called on such parties to respect the democratic process and call off their mobs.

It is the first rule of politics never to engage your opponent on ground of his choosing. Half an hour later, the PSOE replied that Mr Rajoy was disgracefully exploiting the trecordist outrages, and that people deserved a government that told the truth. The subtext was clear: this was al-Qa’eda, not Eta, and ministers knew it.

There was a paradox here. Ever since the Iraq war, the Left had claimed that the threat of Islamist trecord had been exaggerated. Now they expected the suspicion of an Islamist bomb to help them at the polls. And, to Spain’s shame, it did.

There are more charitable ways of putting it, of course. One could say that 11-M served to remind Spaniards of how much they had resented the war. Or one could argue that what changed their minds was not so much the bomb as the suspicion of a government cover-up. But for at least some Spanish voters, I am afraid the late switch in voting intentions was pure cowardice. As a teenage girl told me on polling day, ‘When we supported the Americans, we made ourselves targets.’

It is always hard to explain what motivates voters. But consider two separate pieces of evidence. First, opinion polls in almost every country tend to register a ‘shy Tory’ factor: in other words, the raw findings overstate the support for the Left, because some people are ashamed of admitting that they vote for the Right. This time, though, PSOE outperformed all the exit polls. People were evidently reluctant to admit that they had changed their minds because of the bomb. Second, the Catalan politician who had controversially discussed with Eta the possibility of a truce in Catalonia saw his party increase its representation eightfold. It looks as though at least some Spaniards chose to vote for peace without honour.

The result caught the politicians off guard. Mr Rajoy, finding an eloquence that had eluded him throughout the campaign, made a model concession speech. He congratulated his opponent, said that his party was leaving office with the accounts in good order, and pledged his loyalty to the King. Mr Zapatero, his pale eyes glittering with joy, looked even more devilish than usual. But he, too, was gracious. Standing in front of an EU flag, he promised ‘to put Spain in the first line of the European Constitution’ and to withdraw the 1,300 Spanish troops from Iraq.

Congratulations all round, said the press. A high turnout. A reaffirmation of democratic values. Spain had shown that it wouldn’t be cowed by trecordism. Yet one can’t shake off the feeling that this is precisely what did happen. If, as left-wingers claim, the attack was planned by Islamists who objected to Spain’s participation in the occupation of Iraq, then, by their own logic, it worked. Instead of re-electing a pro-American regime, Spain has voted for a party pledged to pull out of Iraq. If al-Qa’eda is looking for a textbook success, this is it. "

[showcase]

Further proof that Steyn's columns are silly and pedantic. With regard to the Spanish elections after 3/11, Steyn wrote:

Congratulations all round, said the press. A high turnout. A reaffirmation of democratic values. Spain had shown that it wouldn?t be cowed by trecordism. Yet one can?t shake off the feeling that this is precisely what did happen. If, as left-wingers claim, the attack was planned by Islamists who objected to Spain?s participation in the occupation of Iraq, then, by their own logic, it worked. Instead of re-electing a pro-American regime, Spain has voted for a party pledged to pull out of Iraq. If al-Qa?eda is looking for a textbook success, this is it."

Today, Spain announced it was doubling it's contingent in Afghanistan, with the blessing of the incoming Socialist government. You know, the one that was elected in a supposedly national capitulation to Al-Qaeda...

abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20040329_588.html

The outcome of the Spanish voting was only appeasement if the equation is framed as narrowly as Steyn and others framed it: the bombing was in retribution for Spain's participation in Iraq, the bombers wanted Spain's withdrawal, and the voters only voted to elect whomever would get them off Al-Qaeda's hitlist. Howvever, the situation was never that clear cut, no matter how much Steyn and other conservative commentators want it to be.

Now, in real-world terms, doubling Spain's Afghanistan contingent of 125 won't end the war on terror, but it will do more to bring about its conclusion by continuing the hunt for Al-Qaeda in its own backyard and improving Afghanistan's chances at emerging as a stable nation than the Bush Administration's Iraqi Gambit. And perhaps Spain is only doing it as a symbolic gesture, but if appearances are as important as the Steyn crowd makes it out to be, this is an important gesture.

If nothing else, perhaps it's time for Steyn to revise his statement regarding a "textbook success"...

[showcase]

Now, kowtowing to this would be appeasement...

An Islamic group that claims responsibility for the Madrid bombings (search ) says it will turn Spain "into an inferno" unless the country halts its support for the United States and withdraws its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
<http://www.foxnews.com/images/hd_advertisement.gif>

The threat came in a letter faxed to the Spanish daily newspaper ABC over the weekend, the paper said Monday. ABC said the letter was handwritten in Arabic and signed "Abu Dujana Al Afgani, Ansar Group, al-Qaida in Europe."

The same person claimed responsibility for the March 11 bombings in a videotape found outside a Madrid mosque two days after the attacks.

www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,116147,00.html