A clar­i­fi­ca­tion. As “I men­tioned last night”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000698.php, I worry that the results of the Span­ish elec­tions, in which the PP was thrown out and the PSOE were voted in as a response to last week’s bomb­ings, will be seen as a vic­tory for Islamists such as Osama bin Laden.
But as reader Ted points out

The PP was poised to win the elec­tion even after the bomb­ing. They lost because it became clear that they were inten­tion­ally obfus­cat­ing the truth about the author­ship of the bomb­ings because they knew that if the truth came out, it would dam­age (although not com­pletely) their chances at reelec­tion. In other words, they lost the elec­tion because they were caught lying to the pub­lic about a very, very sen­si­tive issue, on top of every­thing else. It was the lie that was the nail in the cof­fin. It was their own stu­pid­ity that sealed their fate, not the act of terrorism.

I think there’s a lot of truth to this, and I should have been more clear in my writ­ing — jet­lag sucks — that regard­less of the rea­son the Span­ish voted out the PP, it’s almost assured that al Qaeda and other ter­ror­ists will believe they influ­enced the elec­tion. It is this con­clu­sion — rightly or wrongly drawn — that I fear will embolden the ene­mies of peace. It’s cer­tainly a hell of a recruit­ment tool.
Juan cole “notes that”:http://www.juancole.com/2004_03_01_juancole_archive.html#107942407001890750

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.

Well, not in an absolute uni­verse, no, and the fact that the elec­tions went off at all is a vic­tory against al Qaeda. But I’m not so much wor­ried about how the Span­ish vote will be spun on _Le Monde’s_ edi­to­r­ial page as I am how it will be spun in Peshawar’s _madrassas_. In a bat­tle of ideas, it’s not always what’s real that wins; more often what’s more pleas­ing to believe does.
So the ques­tion is: Does an elec­torate have a respon­si­bil­ity to throw out a manip­u­la­tive, dis­tant rul­ing party — hm… — regardless of the con­se­quences regard­ing its alliances, or does it “suck it up” and stick with the cur­rent party so as not to give the bad guys any ammu­ni­tion? I guess it depends on whether you think the Spaniards should fol­low their own national inter­ests or the United States.’ Span­ish vot­ers appar­ently felt — for what­ever valid or invalid rea­son — that their country’s inter­est didn’t align with those of the United States regard­ing Iraq. And no one should blame them for that.