Bullish on Spain

MALAGA, Spain — I have been tooling around the south of Spain in search of anti-Americanism and the perfect bullfight. The anti-Americanism does not seem to be much in evidence. There was a homunculus waiter in Seville who became unpleasantly abrupt when my tip did not live up to his expectations — expectations that perhaps become a bit elevated when a Yank swaggers in. Yet, that is about it. Of course, I have been in the company of ordinary Spaniards, not university professors or parlor intellectuals, and those are the types that incubate such brilliant ideas as anti-Americanism.

"They aren't anti-American, but they're extremely against our foreign policy."

That's certainly my impression as well, and I find it disquieting that there is so much reflexive anti-Spanish (and anti-European) invective in evidence on the US right – it seems to me the counterpart of the equally reflexive anti-Americanism still present on the European Left. We can indulge ourselves in as much of this as we wish, but doing so doesn’t change the fact that the invasion of Iraq completed the reversal of international solidarity with the US after 9/11, international opinion, even amongst our former allies, is now almost universally unfavorable to US interests on a wide range of anti-terrorist issues.

Most opinion here holds that the gains were worth the losses; I'm certainly in the minority in my belief that this is still very much an open question, that we have incurred significant losses, and whatever the gains for the Iraqi people, the direct benefits to the US have so far been less than many hoped and promised.

But one thing I am certain of is that when you have a policy that's not working as you wish – that in fact is bombing – it's like have a product or service that's just not flying with customers. And that you know you have really big problems when the only step being taken to deal with the situation is to spend a lot of time explaining (mostly to yourself) that the customers are fools, or that they don’t understand the obvious virtues of your offerings, or that they are being mislead by the competition and so on.

Even if one or more of these assertions are true, unless you are doing something more constructive than merely reassuring each other that your superior offerings will obviously succeed you are doing nothing to make it happen; at a minimum you have virtually no chance of improving the situation unless you have a realistic understanding of why you offerings are perceived the way they are, which is the necessary first step to changing those perceptions.

US policy, even via military fiat, does not occur in a political vacuum: the invasion of Iraq was possible at an affordable material and human cost only because it could be staged from the territory of other nations; it would have been enormously more costly were we not able to operate from countries on Iraq's southern border, as it was it was made considerably more difficult by the discovery that public opinion seriously limited operations from Turkish soil.

(Consider the difficulty in which we would find ourselves if an Islamic regime appeared poised to come to power in a nuclear armed Pakistan while the majority of our easily deployable forces tied down in Iraq and no politically viable staging area other than Afghanistan).

Now, as we are discovering, support for the effort in Iraq has seriously eroded even amongst the allies we *were* able to recruit; Spain is merely the most recent and dramatic example. And as in the case of Turkey we were once again blind-sided by the belief that inter-governmental efforts would trump public opinion.

Now, once again, we fume and call people names.

And once again, they respond by perceiving us as schoolyard bullies, threatening to punch them out when they call us on whet they perceive as our lies and manipulations. (If you send any amount of time listening to Europeans – even many Conservative Europeans – it quickly becomes clear, for example, that they view the entire Iraqi WMD issue as a gigantic con. And on the facts as they fell out, it's hard to argue the point, which frequently comes down to their leaving you a choice, from their perspective, of whether to defend US policymakers are fools or liars.)

If the conflict with Militant Islam was going to be a short-lived project, this sort of angry disconnect would perhaps be a less pressing issue.

But this effort is likely going to continue across decades, through administrations Democratic and Republican, often as background theme as other domestic and international issues push themselves to the fore. The efforts of this administration are merely the opening chapter, and like any other novel effort there are going to be successes and failures, polices that work well and policies that require modification.

And it sems to me that given the realistic need for allies in this effort – especially as the US increasingly becomes one of a number of major economic and ideological centers rather than the center of gravity, and as we increasingly face challenges that require military interventions on terms increasingly unforgivable to a go-it-alone US – that we are moving backwards, rather than forwards, with a policy which appears (whatever it's actual motivation) contemptuous of those from whom we require assistance.

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