Spain and Australia: the parallels [BARF]

The Sydney Morning Herald ^ | 3-18-04 | By Margo Kingston, Grade 'A' Wanker

[Oldeconomybuyer]

The tactics of the pro-war crowd who’ve hung in there knowing we were lied to and watching a war about to enter its second year never change. The Spanish people are now appeasers, as is everyone else who opposed the war for what turned out to be bloody good reasons and now want the UN to take over as quickly as possible to end the US/British/Australian occupation.

 

Please have a read of New Spanish government a circuit breaker on Iraq by new Webdiarist Sam Guthrie. And please, Miranda Devine and co, accept that we all want to fight terrorism. Some of us, though, don’t believe we can do so when governed by liars and spinmeisters who we can’t bloody trust and who mow down people we feel we can trust.

A colleague sent me a great email today:

“I get the feeling there's a great many people out there who really object to this issue being politicised at all. Did you read the Lateline transcript of Tony Jones's interview with Downer? Downer's pathetic waffle was a real object lesson in what happens when politicians think they can take people for complete fools. It would be worth a piece on whether the "art" of evasion is at all helpful when the world is witnessing the true horror of commuter trains being blown up by backpacks containing bombs triggered by mobile phone detonators. When that happens don't we all expect our politicians (and journos) to get serious and coalitioned rather than point-scoring?”

In yesterday feedback Webdiary Spain aftershock: your say, several Webdiarists accused me of writing things I did not write, so I thought I’d make my position crystal clear. It is the same as that of Michigan history professor and Iraq expert Juan Cole, whose blog is a must-read on Iraq and its consequences. He wrote, on March 16, in part:

Did al-Qaeda Win the Spanish Elections? This silly question is being asked by billionaire Rupert Murdoch's and Conrad Black's media outlets all over the world in blazing headlines. For some strange reason, the billionaires aren't happy that the Socialist Workers' Party won the elections in Spain, and are trying to portray the outcome as cowardice on the part of the Spanish public.

The entire argument is specious from beginning to end. First of all, the Iraq war had nothing to do with the battle against al-Qaeda. Nothing whatsoever. Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and others were pressing for a war against Iraq in the 1990s before al-Qaeda had even become much of a threat to the US... Jose Maria Aznar, in supporting Bush on the war against Iraq, was not standing up to al-Qaeda.

I believe that the Spanish public just recognized the correctness of the "opportunity cost" argument about the Iraq War and anti-terrorism efforts. Let's say you are in business. If you put your capital, which is limited, into expanding one part of your business ("X"), you may make money - say 7% percent on your investment. But you had another opportunity to put your money into expanding a different part of the business ("Y"), and that would have given you a 25% percent return (which you did not know at the time). Giving up the 25% return is an opportunity cost of doing X rather than Y.

The Iraq War represents an enormous opportunity cost in the counter-insurgency struggle against al-Qaeda and its constituents. After the Afghanistan War, the Bush administration forgot to ask Congress for any money for Afghanistan reconstruction, and Congress helpfully put in $300 million. This year, the Bush administration will put $1 billion into Afghanistan, an immense country devastated by 25 years of war (for which the US bears some responsibility), in which the Taliban is having a resurgence...

Since the end of the Afghanistan War, al-Qaeda has struck at Mombasa, Bali, Riyadh, Casablanca, Istanbul, Madrid and elsewhere. Some chatter suggested that Ayman al-Zawahiri himself ordered the hit on Istanbul. The attack on a Spanish cultural center in Casablanca in May of 2003 now appears to have been a harbinger of the horrible Madrid train bombings last week. How much did Spain spend to go after the culprits in Casablanca? How much did Bush dedicate to that effort? How much did they instead invest in military efforts in Iraq?

Instead of dealing with this growing and world-wide threat, the Bush administration cynically took advantage of the American public's anger and fear after September 11 and channeled it against the regime of Saddam Hussein, which had had nothing to do with September 11 and which never could be involved in such a terrorist operation on American soil because its high officers knew exactly the retribution that would be visited on them. Only an asymmetrical organization could think of a September 11, because it has no exact return address...

The Iraq adventure is likely to have cost the US nearly $250 billion by next year this time. The US is no safer now than it was before the Iraq war, since Iraq did not have any weapons that could hit US soil and would not have risked using them even if it did.

Let me repeat that. Maybe $1.3 billion for Afghanistan. $250 billion for Iraq. Bin Laden and his supporters are in Afghanistan. What is wrong with this picture?

There is not and cannot be such a thing as a "war on terror." Terror is a tactic. There can be a global counter-insurgency struggle against al-Qaeda and kindred organizations. But a large part of such a struggle must be to deny al-Qaeda recruitment tools and propaganda victories. The way the Bush administration pursued the war against Iraq, as a superpower-led act of Nietzschean will to power, simply made it look in the Middle East as though al-Qaeda had been right. Bin Laden's message was that Middle Easterners are being colonized and occupied by the United States.

There is no evidence at all that the Spanish public desires the new Socialist government to pull back from a counter-insurgency effort against al-Qaeda. The evidence is only that they became convinced that the war on Iraq had detracted from that effort rather than contributing to it. This is not a cowardly conclusion and it is not a victory for al-Qaeda...

Here is what Zapatero said about all this, according to the Washington Post:

”The war [in Iraq] has been a disaster; the occupation continues to be a disaster," Zapatero told a radio interviewer. At a news conference later, he called the Iraq war "an error." He added, "It divided more than it united, there were no reasons for it, time has shown that the arguments for it lacked credibility, and the occupation has been poorly managed." He pledged to continue to combat international terrorism, but said the fight should be conducted with "a grand alliance" of democracies and not through "unilateral wars," a clear reference to Iraq.”…

Here's my rough rendering of Zapatero's full statement, which Fox Cable News will not read out in its entirety:

"Tonight I commit myself to commence a tranquil government and I assure you that power is not going to change me," affirmed Zapatero between the applause of hundreds of people who congregated to celebrate the triumph.

"My most immediate priority is to fight all forms of terrorism (Mi prioridad mas inmediata es combatir toda forma de terrorismo). And my first initiative, tomorrow, will be to seek a union of political forces to join us together in fighting it."

After defining himself as "prepared to assume the responsibility to form the new government", Zapatero described his priorities.

"I will set out to strengthen the prestige of democratic institutions . . . to move Spain into the vanguard of European development and to guide myself by the Constitution at every moment"

"The government of change," he added "will act from the dialogue, responsibility and transparency. It will be a government that will work by cohesion, concord and peace."

After nearly four years of White House rhetoric stolen from old Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns, the determination in this speech to pursue anti-terrorism with an eye to establishing social peace and creating the conditions of human development hits me as a gale of fresh air.

So this is what al-Qaeda was going for with the train bombs? To create a "grand alliance" of democracies against it? Zapatero's speech is a victory for Bin Laden?

No, it is a defeat only for the Bush administration and the Neoconservative philosophy of Perpetual War…

With the secession of Spain from the "coalition of the willing," the rug has been pulled out from under the Bush doctrine of preemption, the Bush commitment to US military action without a proper UNSC resolution, and the Bush conviction that you can fool all the people all the time. Since Bush administration militarism and desire to go about overthrowing most of the governments in the Middle East actually was highly destabilizing and created enormous numbers of potential recruits for al-Qaeda, the Spanish actions are a great victory for the counter-insurgency struggle against al-Qaeda.

Webdiarist Luke Stegemann, a former resident of Spain now lecturing in Osaka, would also like to set a few records straight. He sees parallels between Australian and Spanish politics:

As a long-term Australian resident of Spain and having just left the country after spending most of the election campaign there, I must comment on the deeply insulting - not to say patronising - attitude shown by those who suggest that the new Spanish government is there thanks to Al-Qaeda, and that this is somehow a ‘victory for terrorism’.

This misguided view implies that the previous government is to be absolved of responsibility for its authoritarianism and highly divisive means of ruling the country. Anybody familiar with Spanish politics would have known that the country was ripe for change. The Spanish participation in the war in Iraq against the vast majority of people’s wishes was one of many reasons the Spaniards wished to change their government.

The new Spanish government was elected by the Spanish people through a transparent and democratic process. They'd had enough of a highly centrist and hard-right party. As far as the majority of Spaniards are concerned (and I’ve spoken to quite a few since the election result), the election was a victory for democracy, not terrorism. And isn't the protection - or promotion - of democracy what the whole "war on terror" is about?

There are a number of striking parallels between the rise and fall and political hue of elected governments in Australia and Spain going back to the early 1980s. If the trend is to continue, there are some clear pointers to the national election later this year.

For the purposes of this comparison we can equate quite closely, in terms of ideology and political practice, the Australian ALP and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) and the Liberal Party and Spain’s conservative Partido Popular (PP).

In 1982, the PSOE swept to power as the first Socialist government since the days of the Civil War under the leadership of Felipe Gonzalez. This was mirrored the following year in Australia by the sweeping to power of the ALP under Bob Hawke in 1983 (notwithstanding the Whitlam years which look, in hindsight, like an historical and political aberration, despite the enormous social advances made in those three short years).

The PSOE ruled until 1996, increasingly alienated from its traditional support base as economic rationalism came to exert its grip on models of governance, and beset by corruption scandals. The ALP also held power until 1996.

In Spain, where elections are held every 4 years rather than our 3, the PSOE was widely tipped to lose power in 1992, until Felipe Gonzalez won an ‘unwinnable election’ to take one more term, as did Paul Keating the following year in Australia. It was to be the final term for both parties.

The Spanish PSOE and the Australian ALP then went into the political wilderness as more right-wing governments took over. The Liberal Party under John Howard and the PP under Jose Maria Aznar came resoundingly to power on the same weekend in March, 1996.

The similarities between Aznar and Howard were both physical (small men who punched well above their weight) and ideological: neo-conservative, authoritarian, masters of the wedge, and so on.

Last year, Aznar and Howard stood shoulder to shoulder with Blair and Bush though curiously, while in Australia those opposed to the war or the ‘coalition of the willing’ talk of the triumvirate of Bush-Blair-Howard (with no mention of Aznar), in Spain, where popular opposition to the war was even stronger than in Australia, everyone talks of the ‘assassins’ Bush-Blair-Aznar – no-one has even heard of Howard!

A significant difference, and what may be more telling as time goes on, is that last year Aznar decided to step down and personally appointed his successor, Mariano Rajoy, as part of a generational change Howard has pointedly refused to entertain.

At the same time, the Spanish PSOE fielded their young leader, a fresh-faced 43 year-old (I know Mark Latham may not be fresh-faced, but does it sound familiar?) It is very easy to see the parallels continue between the two countries, with Mark Latham coming to power later this year on a wave of public frustration with intolerance and unadulterated spin, just as ‘bambi’ Zapatero (as he is known) has taken the Spanish election.

Of course, the Australian elections – one hopes – will not take place against a background of near civil unrest such as was brewing on the streets of Spain last Saturday, as the PP continued in its fervent efforts to pin blame for the atrocity on ETA despite all the evidence to the contrary.

I was told by my Spanish wife (who was in the middle of it all) that such tension had not been felt on the streets of Spain since the aborted military coup of February, 1983, when gunmen opened fire in the National Parliament and the tanks rolled onto the streets of Valencia.

Now we see that Pedro Almodovar is in hot water for making this very claim – that the country was close to a coup d’etat last Saturday evening. Yet even if we do go to vote, as expected and hoped, under very different conditions, the Australian people have more than enough reasons to cry, as the Spanish people have done in a different context, “Enough is enough”.

Since the last election, the children overboard affair and the war in Iraq are but two instances of appalling spin that one hopes will come back to haunt the Howard government and, like Spain’s conservatives, they will be made to pay for their contemptuous treatment of the general public by being thrown out of government. The argument of a good economic record will have nothing to do with it.

If Mark Latham and the ALP are elected to power later this year, the political nature of the respective governments in Madrid and Canberra will carry on in curious parallel, even after 22 years. And if Latham does win, let’s hope that no-one is contemptuous enough of the will of the Australian people to claim it as a ‘victory for Al-Qaeda’.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

I didn't want to waste bandwidth and post the entire article...

[Blood of Tyrants]

I guess that this is what passes for objective reporting in the Sydney Morning Herald and repeats every single left wing kook mantra.

"we were lied to"</i?

“I get the feeling there's a great many people out there who really object to this issue being politicised at all."

How DARE we politicize an election!

the Iraq war had nothing to do with the battle against al-Qaeda.

Riiiiight!