[Cerchio] Rejection of the Politics of Lies Starts Abroad

Spain Flips Off W.
Rejection of the Politics of Lies Starts Abroad
by Doug Ireland

March 18, 2004

“Old Europe” got its revenge. The Spanish elections eliminated George W. Bush’s
most important ally on the European continent, registered a resounding rejection
of the White House’s imperial foreign policy, and dramatically shifted the
balance of power within the European Union against the Atlanticist alliance that
sundered the authority of the United Nations by invading Iraq.

The war in Iraq was nowhere more unpopular than in Spain, where public-opinion
polls consistently showed 90 percent of its people opposed to the invasion. And
no European leader, except Tony Blair, was more identified with Bush and his war
than Spain’s austere, ultraconservative premier, Jose Maria Aznar. By contrast,
the man who sent the conservatives packing — Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the
new, young leader of the Socialist Party — had made a central theme of his
campaign his promise to withdraw the 1,300 Spanish troops helping to occupy
Iraq. And he pledged to effectuate a “180-degree turn” by “taking Spain out of
the trio of the Azores” (a reference to the Bush-Blair-Aznar summit in the
Azores that immediately preceded the Iraq invasion).

Spain responded to the murderous March 11 terrorist bombings with a vibrant
demonstration of democracy that brought a record 77 percent turnout and 2
million new voters — overwhelmingly young and anti-war — to the polls to throw
out the conservatives. But the U.S. right is in full-throated cry at the
election results. “Terrorism has won a mighty victory in Spain,” thundered David
Frum — the former Bush speechwriter who coined the religion-tinged phrase “Axis
of Evil” — in a National Review online column that hysterically vituperated the
Spaniards for “low, truckling, appeasement.”

This arrant nonsense conveniently ignores that Spain’s voters also sanctioned
Aznar for using the Big Lie technique in an attempt to exploit the bombings for
political advantage by blaming them on the Basque terrorist group ETA. In the
province of Catalonia, the Socialists are part of a four-party governing
coalition that includes a tiny Basque separatist party whose chief had recently
met with ETA leaders. By blaming the bombings that cost more than 200 lives on
ETA, Aznar & Co. hoped to use guilt-by-association in Catalonia to paint the
Socialists as soft on terrorism.

In a campaign of media manipulation that the European press has described as
worthy of Vladimir Putin, Aznar personally took charge of the government’s
disinformation operation, telephoning the publishers of the principal daily
newspapers to insist that “only” ETA was responsible for the bombings and that
they say so in their coverage. Aznar’s interior minister informed the media that
the bombs were made from the dynamite Titadyn, the same kind used by ETA (this,
too, turned out to be false). Counselors in the Moncloa Palace (the Spanish
White House) even pressured foreign correspondents in Madrid to demand that they
blame ETA in their reporting, claiming there was “no doubt” about ETA’s role.
And in the three days leading up to Sunday’s voting, TV stations controlled by
Aznar’s conservatives repeatedly aired a documentary on ETA’s long history of
political assassinations to keep voter fury at ETA white-hot.

But the lie backfired, big-time. Led by an independent left-wing radio station,
Spanish media quickly began exposing how the government already knew, when it
told its Big Lie, that the bombings were most likely the work of terrorists
linked to al Qaeda. On the night before the voting, demonstrations organized via
the Internet and Palm Pilots turned out large crowds in front of Aznar’s Popular
Party headquarters in Madrid and every other major city. Angry voters chanted,
“The PP Lies, Spain Pays!,” “We’re Fed Up With Manipulations!” and “Our Dead
Give Us the Right to the Truth!” Coming on top of the lies about Iraq’s weapons
of mass destruction — dutifully echoed by Bush’s buddy Aznar — which had been
used to take Spain into war, the lies about the bombings produced a tidal wave
of revulsion that made itself felt at the polls. And the Socialists, who’d been
gaining on the conservatives but were still four points behind in the polls
before the bombings and the lies, reaped the fruits of their consistent
opposition to the Iraq war.

By choosing the 43-year-old Zapatero to lead the country, Spain has left Bush
with only two major European allies: Italy, where fascist-allied Premier Silvio
Berlusconi’s popularity has been dropping following his latest attempts to
manipulate the justice system and avoid being tried on corruption charges; and
Poland, where Leszek Miller’s minority government has only a 10 percent
favorable rating in the polls, thanks to a profound economic crisis coupled with
Miller’s involvement in a corruption scandal. (Significant majorities in both
countries opposed the Iraq war.)

Aznar and the Polish had been blocking the adoption of a new European
constitution that would guarantee that Europe speaks with one voice in
international relations. Under Zapatero, who accused Aznar of “fracturing
Europe” by supporting Bush’s war, Spain will now join the Franco-German duo that
has motored construction of a united Europe with a strong constitution — and
which, together with Belgium, led opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq. This means
an end to Bush’s dream of a “New Europe” in which the supine support of his
imperial adventures by the U.S.’s Eastern European client states, soon to be
admitted to the EU, could veto European opposition to Bush’s policies. Spain’s
new premier has already made the stakes explicit: “With us,” Zapatero proclaimed
last month, “Spain will at last have a government that believes in the necessity
of a reinforced European Union, a government that finds it unacceptable to speak
of ‘Old Europe,’ and a government capable of discussing the unilateral actions
of Mr. Bush,” adding that “From Europe we will work for respect of international
law and U.N. decisions, not the unilateral acts of this or that country.”
Moreover, a strong Europe is the sine qua non of any attempt to put a brake on
the U.S.-led drive toward globalization.

More isolated than ever on the world stage by the Spanish elections, Bush may
have another worry — if the U.S. electorate decides to follow Spain’s lead and
vote against the politics of lies.

Doug Ireland is a New York-based media critic and commentator whose articles
appear regularly in The Nation, Tom Paine.com, and In These Times among many
others. This article first appeared in the LA Weekly.