Russell Brown has written about this today, but I don't think he gets it quite right, he instead discusses the attitudes of the right wing "blogosphere," and whether or not various people are cowards, and who we can trust.
After the terrorist bombings in Spain and the subsequent loss of the ruliing party that was leading in the polls until the attacks, there has been some claims that the terrorists have won.
These claims are wrong.
They would possibly be correct if the people of Spain had been in favour of a war in Iraq, and of continued occupation. Then it could be argued that these attacks have scared the Spanish into voting for someone who will take them out of Iraq and thereby make them safe once more by pacifing these nasty terrorists.
But this is not the case. The Spanish people have not been in favour of invading Iraq, and the government simply ignored their views and teamed up with Britain and the US on operation hunt for Osama/WMD/Kryptonite in the "Iraq" province of Afghanistan.
Russell links to Calpundit who writes that if the voters
were upset that Aznar's support for the Iraq war was responsible for al-Qaeda targeting Spain, which seems to be the theme of this Washington Post story. This would be a considerable victory for al-Qaeda and would reflect very poorly indeed on the Spanish electorate.
Which it probably would, again if and only if they had previously been pro the war, and then suddenly changed their minds.
Instead what I should think happened is that they were reminded of the whole war "thing" and that is was crappy. They were reminded that they had been against the war from the beginning, and some of them were probably reminded that attacking a bunch of people is not the best way to get them to stop attacking you. (Hello Israel?)
They had probably been happy to go with the flow because the economy is going alright, and really in a democracy with this type of election you can only really vote for one thing, the economy seemed to come up trumps in this case.
However the attacks reminded them that there are other things going on, and things they didn't like, nor did they approve of them. And so they voted with their... err votes. And that is what you get.
Or I could be wrong.
Jonathan Freedland and The Guardian does this well.
Democracy is only good when you get what you want.
Posted by: Dave on March 18, 2004 03:06 PM