Spain and War Analogies

I had a debate with a friend of mine the other night about the wisdom of Spain's decision to pull out its troops. I was defending the new spanish government's decision and she was saying it was a disaster. So she pointed me to Tom Friedman's column where he makes her argument, as my friend put it "more elegantly".

I like Friedman and usually agree with him. But something doesn't feel right about this one where he uses a bunch of WWII analogies. The spanish people were lied to by their government, pulled into a war with an enemy they didn't want to fight, and now have elected a government that is doing what they want. That's democracy.

Jeff Jarvis has a good debate going on over at Buzzmachine (read the comments) on this Friedman article that is worth browsing as well.

I think the problem with the war in Iraq is that the world didn't and doesn't support it. Our current government never learned the lessons of another war, Vietnam, which was that you can't go fight an invisible enemy in a hostile land thousands of miles from home, do nation building, etc, without the support of a significant part of the world with you. I recommend the movie Fog of War to anyone interested in learning the lessons of Vietnam.

If we had continued to fight terrorism straight up, instead of trying to settle old scores in a part of the world that wasn't the center of terrorism (but is now), then i think we would have had the support of the world in that war. But our current government didn't do that and screwed up the whole post 9/11 coalition against terrorism. And spain's decision is just the most recent sign of that screw up.

That's my feeling on the matter and hopefully i've stated it more elegantly here than i could to my friend the other night.

Comments

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fred... But the problem is (and I haven't madethis point well): They didn't pull out of the war. They pulled out of the peace. They pulled out of rebuilding Iraq for the Iraqi people and of building the first democracy in the Middle East. Why did they do that and when? That's the problem.

[Kevin]

What concerns me is that terrorism seems to have influenced Spanish elections.

For example a terror attack a few months before the US presidential election may solidify bush, since his approval would most likely increase, similar to mayor Giuliani who wasn’t much liked before September 11th.

Terrorist actions influencing politics is a scary situation.

[Payam Mirrashidi]

Stuart Hughes has had a couple notes taking an opposing viewpoint to the one put forward by Friedman. Paul Krugman's piece today takes this line of reasoning forward some more.

[Jerry]

Umm. Folks. We're talking about 1300 troopers whose "peace-keeping" and "rebuilding" tasks included guarding the docks near Kuwait where supplies come in. And the Spanish were the third or fourth largest deployment of troops in the "Coalition of the Willing" (i.e., Coalition of the Coerced. Remember this coaltion of peacekeepers and rebuilders includes zero troopers from Nicaragua, Estonia, and Croatia)

More than 200 Spainards diedin those attacks. Add those deaths to the deaths from attacks (including the five Italian soldiers killed by "friendly fire" from US troops and you start to see that, as a percentage of their troops sent to fight the war, our European allies are paying a high price for their loyalty to the US).

Not only do I agree with the statements of the new Spanish Prime Minister (whom I believe also said that IF the UN went in and took over rebuilding and peacekeeping, they would send troops.) But I wish the British would do the same.

[JayR]

I can't argue with the notion that a nation whose government lies to it about the basis for a war has every reason to vote that government out. But I have to disagree with the premise that an initiative that the "world" does not support is necessarily wrongheaded. If that were the test, then we would be following the lead of Europe and voting in favor of every anti-Israel resolution that the UN puts up, and at the end of the day we wouldn't have Israel (or any other dependable friend in the Middle East, for that matter). To criticize our activities in Iraq because Bush et al. misled us as to his reasons for going in there is one thing. But to say it was wrong to undertake some type of initiative because the European powers don't support it is something else.

[Fred Wilson]

good point Jay, but i think there's a big difference between supporting Israel's war with our money and weapons, and supporting Iraq's war with our troops who are dying. that's the lesson i was talking about. we shouldn't be putting our troops in harm's way unless we can convince a significant part of the world to do the same.

[JayR]

I don't see one size fitting all here. We haven't had to send troops to Israel so far in part because (arguably) they're an organized and cohesive army, better trained pound-for-pound than we are, with an agenda that we pretty much understand. That isn't the case with Iraq. I'm not comfortable with the notion of sending troops over at the drop of a hat either, and I am deeply troubled by the Bush Administration's due diligence process. But if we have decided that we have a responsibility to maintain some type of equilibrium in that region, what else can we do? Once we have decided that we need to offer some form of assistance to achieve a desirable outcome (and I am not sure I care whose definition of a desirable outcome you use), would you rather send money and weapons to Iraq carte blanche, with no real guarantees regarding the targets they would be aimed at (are those Scud launchers still in place?), or are we better off having at least some modicum of control over the purposes to which our assistance will be used?

[LoneStar]

Fred's a dumbshit, why is anyone suprised by his defence of cowardly spanish socialists?

[David Lloyd-Jones]

It is a simple truth denied by the Bush administration that Al Quaeda's succession of stunningly successful terrorist attacks all over the world are criminal acts, as opposed to acts of warfare. The administration itself, of course, refuses to conform to the Geneva Conventions with respect to prisoners in Guantanamo -- and of course the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of prisoners killed by incarceration in freight containers in Afghanistan. This means that the Bushies themselves are insincere in their claims that this is a "war."

Once you've made the fundamental confusion of crime with war, it follows that everything else will go wrong from there on out. You can't go right by starting out wrong. Simple proposition.

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