Immediately after Spain’s general elections last month, victorious socialist party leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said that he would bring Spanish troops home from Iraq on June 30 should there be no decision by then to transfer authority for Iraq to the UN.
Now, just hours after his government was sworn in, Zapatero announced that Spain’s 1,300-strong contingent would be brought home immediately. Spain has every right to decide where and when to deploy its troops, but this abrupt reversal points up the Spanish leader’s inexperience — he has never held ministerial office before. Effectively, the first act of his administration has been to demonstrate that he is inconsistent.
His justification — that there now seems to him no likelihood of the UN voting to take over the security mandate in Iraq — is debatable. The first reason is the fact that post-June 30, it will be up to the Iraqis to decide who is or is not invited to help with security. The second is that the process of a Security Council resolution has only just begun. Just how much further the Bush White House will embrace a solution that it once scorned remains to be seen. The US president will probably do whatever he can to escape the Iraqi hook on which he has hung himself. The key will be the degree to which American generals can still command a UN force. Bush needs a face-saving resolution.
Zapatero’s decision will do more than impact on his government’s credibility. It could look to Al-Qaeda as though the new administration is like a straw in the wind. They already believe that Spanish voters ran scared after the Madrid massacre on the eve of the election. It really looked as if Spaniards took the attack as a punishment for Spain’s Iraq policy and therefore threw out the politicians who had led them into it.
This was the wrong message to send to the terrorists. By appearing to cave in, Spain made itself a weak link in the united front against international terrorism and thus a prime target for further attacks. The subsequent attempt by terrorists to blow up an express train in the hope of intimidating Spain shows that the downward slide has already started.
The willingness to leave Iraq now — and in so doing perhaps protect the lives of Spanish soldiers now there — will nonetheless encourage the terrorists. Spanish police and intelligence have acted with great efficiency in identifying the cells behind the Madrid slaughter and further planned attacks. Al-Qaeda will calculate that if they can mount an impressive threat, the Zapatero government will give in and release the suspects. In disengaging from Iraq so precipitously, far from giving Spain security, Zapatero has put it in the firing line.
