When the Spanish got bombed by al qaeda and then withdrew from Iraq, they sent a clear message to terrorists that they will be intimidated and will surrender to terrorism. AQ might now leave them alone, but ETA now have carte blanche to bomb them into another surrender.

The UK got bombed too and we stayed in Iraq... then got bombed again (in a really half-arsed way). Maybe it says more about the Spanish police than anything else.

They didn't surrender to AQ, they just punished their govt for going against their collective will and bringing death on the populace. ETA is Spains business, Iraq wasn't.

The Spaniards didnt want to go into Iraq in the first place- it was mega-unpopular, but the govt joined up anyway. What I picked up from that was that when you go against the public will in Spain, the electorate vote you out, but when you go against the electorate in the UK they grumble a whole lot and then vote you back in. Remember also that the then-govt in Spain tried to pin the Al-Qaeda bombings on ETA (who they were taking a hard line against) before the facts came to light, which didn't help them much, either.

Not to say that it's OK for one group to bomb you to death and not another, but rather that blatantly lying to the populace seems to carry a heavier price over there than here.

Edited by glazbagun on Sunday 9th August 23:36

The government didn't surrender to AQ, the Spanish people did. When the British are bombed we tend to dig our heels in and say we will not be bullied, the Spanish people clearly prefer appeasement and chose to vote that way but then they were still a military dictatorship right up into the seventies, so perhaps rolling over is more in their national character.

Did you even read my post? The government went to war against the will of its electorate for no justifiable reason (why did Spain go to war with Iraq? Why did we and the US go to war with Iraq?) Which then drew the attention of AQ. Which the govt then blamed on it's own local terrorism problem (IE: lied to the populace, making itself look better before the elections), but it emerged that it was an Islamist terror attack after all. The people didn't want to be in Iraq before the attack, but they paid with their lives because of their governments decisions. In my view, changing their minds over Iraq based on a non-Iraqi attack on their country would be exactly what "letting the terrorists win" means.

These days "letting the terrorists win" seems to mean living your life as you normally would, where "beating the terrorsits" means accepting all kinds of grey-area laws to limit freedom and clamp down on lawful protest. Back to the original point- I don't think that the election results post AQ-attack have given ETA the green flag to start blowing s

t up five years later.

esselte

14,626 posts

268 months

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Monday 10th August 2009

Eric Mc said:

Who have we capitulated to?

The Labour Party?

Eric Mc

122,077 posts