Not Voting The American Way

We've heard it's hard to oust a President in wartime. In Spain, however, the ruling party lost power in Sunday elections only 4 days after the multi-bomb attack on Madrid's subway, killing 190 and injuring 1,500. The party installed -- the Socialists -- ran pledging to remove the 1,300 Spanish troops from Iraq, and now it seems they will do so, in July, when their tour of duty is over. Interestingly, the vote seemed entirely motivated to disengage from Iraq so that they don't get hit by Al Qaeda because, other than the Gov't unpopular stance of supporting the US in Iraq, they did no wrong: "In one fell swoop, voters ousted Aznar, whose party was favored to win just days ago, even though he brought Spain eight straight years of economic growth, made it a founding member of the euro single currency, cut unemployment in half and brought a degree of prominence to a long-ignored country."

One can argue that this was an enlightened vote to put into power a party to withdraw from a war which had nothing to do with fighting terrorism. Except that argument ignores the fact that Anzar's government was heading toward electoral victory before Thursday -- they were derailed by the bombings. In other words, Spain was intimidated out of Iraq by terrorist actions.

We used to joke about this ("If I don't eat a second piece of cake, the terrorists will already have won"). But it seems possible that Al Qaeda scored an electoral victory by bombing the Spanish people into submission.