Friedman: So do terrorists want Right-wing governments, or left wing ones?

Thomas Friedman makes the claim that the weapons of terror to be used in the new war were honed and perfected in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He states that the election-eve bombing of Madrid is a Palestinian tactic, to affect the outcome of the election.

However, in Israel, he says, the tactic was applied to effect election of right-wing politicians, to make bad political decisions and further radicalize and destabilize the situation. But that's not what happened in Madrid, where the right-wing party was thrown out of power, and the left wing party was installed -- so left wing, that they are being accused of withdrawal and appeasement.

These are about as different political states as can be, so it must be said that the direction that an election-eve bombing pushes depends strongly on the political inclination of the voters. In both Israel and Madrid, bombs go off on public transport, but in Israel, people elect Sharon, who pops a missile down on the leader of Hamas, while in Madrid, people elect a government strapping Nike's onto their soldiers feet in Iraq so that they can sprint on out of there.

Friedman says Al Qaida doesn't do polling, it does big picture. But, for the blunt tool of public bombings to have completely opposite political effects -- and for Friedman to claim that both the PLO and Al Qaida meant to have exactly those political ends, and not the undesirable opposite end -- means that they know exactly how the population will respond to bombing. You can't throw an election 10 points in either direction if you don't know what the effect of the bomb is going to be -- Al Qaida must do polling, then?

Hogwash! Balderdash! The fact is that bombing kills people and scares the population into thinking the terrorists are in charge. The electoral result can be either one in the direction of right-wing crackdowns eliciting radicalization, or withdrawal and appeasement, and arguments can be made in both cases that that helps the bombers. But the bombers aren't bombing to have specifically one or the other effect. They're bombing so that they matter, at all, so that they are not as powerless as their numbers and logical basis should dictate in a world of rational democracies. They're bombing because their votes count for nothing, and they demand reaction -- any reaction -- to what they want.