BuzzMachine

This leads to the point I was trying to make on your previous thread. I'll quote again from Ian Murray who has actually done the numbers on the turnout not just reactionary propaganda. The attacks should have caused a backlash against AQ not Spain. They still have troops in Iraq fighting alongside our troops. To call them cowards is stupid. And you remove AQ from the equation whilst feeding them with the assumption they forced a western govt. out of office. Which, IMO, is quite cowardly. We should be standing tall with Spain, our ally, not allowing AQ to divide and conquer.VIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP

"Close to 40 percent of the Spanish people voted for the PP despite the attacks, despite the accusations of lies and despite the widespread unhappiness with Prime Minister Aznar's decisions on Iraq (90 percent opposition in some polls). While 43 percent of Spaniards voted for the Socialist Party".VIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP

"To take Spain first, the shift in power to the Socialist Party was entirely due to an increased turnout of voters. In 2000, about 21.5 million people voted in the Spanish elections. In 2004, 2.5 million more voted. The Socialist vote increased by 3 million, while the Conservative vote dropped by only 700,000. This was no massive swing away from the Partido Popular (PP) to the Socialists, but an effect of a small percentage of the population feeling motivated to vote when otherwise they would have not. In fact, it seems likely that the PP's vote actually firmed up, given that opinion polls before the Madrid bombings had the Socialists gaining on the PP even without the extra votes. By my calculations, on a turnout equivalent to 2000, the PP would have received about 300,000 fewer votes than it did".VIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP

http://www.techcentralstation.com/031704F.htmlVIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP Posted by: KMK on March 18, 2004 09:50 AM

I'm always suspicious about arguments being attributed to any "intellectual class." Too often, the game being played is to invent an assertion, or cherry-pick a bit of silliness, and attribute it to a whole swathe of people who often have widely divergent views. It's hard to know if Sheridan is doing this, but there are some warning signs: "If only we have the approval of the UN, al-Qaeda won't attack us, this thinking sometimes goes." "Sometimes," when? Who is he attributing this argument to? Is his rendition of "liberal" talk shows accurate, or are we just getting the kind of distorted funhouse-mirror view of them that constitutes so much of the American conservative myth about "liberal media bias"?VIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP

It doesn't help that Sheridan's own "analysis" of al Qaeda is bizarre and inconsistent. "Liberals" supposedly "dehumanise the terrorists by in effect denying that the terrorists possess the agency of moral choice," but nevertheless it's obvious that the terrorist ideology "is not going to be affected in the slightest degree by any possible action we take." So, terrorists have the agency of moral choice, except we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that they will never ever exercise it, therefore they really don't have it?VIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP

In fairness, the point Sheridan is probably trying to make is that we should hold the terrorists responsible for their choices, and not expect active terrorist cells to respond according to what we'd think of as a rational political calculus, because they won't. Maybe that's what he means, but what he says is just gibberish. And so I kind of have to be suspicious about his abilities to accurately represent the position he claims to be arguing against.VIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP Posted by: Doctor Slack on March 18, 2004 10:36 AM

The biggest problem with assessments like this one is the way in which they continually re-write when the war on terrorism began. This writer would have a valid point, if and only if the war on terror began with the invasion of Iraq. However, since the WOT actually began a year and a half earlier and nearly every nation signed on at that time, they were already made a target of AQ. So the question of whether or not joining in Bush's Iraq folly made a nation a target of AQ becomes a moot point since those nations were already targets of AQ.VIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP Posted by: Robert McClelland on March 18, 2004 12:19 PM

So the question of whether or not joining in Bush's Iraq folly made a nation a target of AQ becomes a moot point since those nations were already targets of AQ.VIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP

True enough. And that means that people on both sides who immediately attributed the bombings to Iraq were wrong to do so.VIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP

Of course, the "appeasers" argument about the Spanish -- which is the subtext of Sheridan's piece, of course -- is a little more subtle than this, at least in some of its incarnations. Once you get past the layer of crude name-callers, there are people arguing that regardless of the real connection to Iraq, the Spanish voters gave the impression that terrorist attacks could affect their judgment, and that's the issue. VIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP

Unfortunately, that version is just as daft, though superficially more plausible. The fact is, any reaction from the Spanish that acknowledged the attacks in any way would give the terrorists the impression that they can affect voters' judgment. Someone who voted PP because there had been bombings would be just as guilty of "appeasement" on this rationale as someone who voted PSOE. VIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP Posted by: Doctor Slack on March 18, 2004 12:35 PM

Jeff - if we are all agreed that it is stupid and futile to adjust our behavior according to what we think Al Qaeda wants, why are you so insistent that the Spanish people should have voted for the government against their own wishes merely in order to spite Al Qaeda?VIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP

Don't you see the contradiction?
VIRTUAL DRIVE NETWORK BAJAR XP Posted by: Mork on March 18, 2004 05:16 PM