Thank you Congressman Billyboy ! Excellent article !Will We Face a Madrid Mistake?
Excerpt:
I had the extreme displeasure last week of hearing Professor Beau Grosscup of California State University at Chico, arguing on TV that we should “understand” the position of the terrorists, and on that basis we should “negotiate” with them. The host of the program on which this educated fool appeared missed the opportunity to ask the good professor whether we should have negotiated with Emperor Tojo, or with Der Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, because that’s exactly where his views would have led sixty years ago.
Grosscup is a “Professor of International Relations.” To have a clue about how anyone could look at modern history as he does, here is the title of his doctoral dissertation: “Isolationism and American Foreign Policy. A study of the debate over isolationist trends in US foreign policy, utilizing a Wittgensteinian scheme of explication and a comparative analysis of Chinese, Japanese, British and US foreign policies.” As Tom Lehrer once said of mathematicians, it is important to understand “how they got that way.”
The situation in Spain prior to its 3/11 bombings was that Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s Popular Party was headed for a close but solid win. Mr. Aznar, who had been a staunch ally of the US and a supporter of the war on terrorism, was expected to hand the reins of government over to his hand-picked successor. Then came the attacks. Three days later the Spaniards voted out the Popular Party and handed the government over to the Socialist, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who had announced in advance that he would pull Spain’s token 1,500 troops out of Iraq. It was, as many commentators have pointed out, a “clear win for the terrorists.”
What if anything does the Spanish experience suggest, as Americans approach our own election in the fall?
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