Beyond the Line: On Infinite Decolonization

Abstract

Look around the table. If you don’t see any suckers, then get up. Because you are the sucker. Amarillo Slim (the world’s greatest poker player) The week of the Madrid M-11 terrorist bombings was also the last week of the political campaign before the Spanish general elections, held on 14 March 2004. Polls had anticipated a fairly solid Popular Party victory, as the Socialist Workers’ Party was lagging by about four percentage points when the last official poll was taken on 7 March. Instead, the Popular Party was seriously defeated by a wide margin, and the Socialist Workers’ Party obtained a solid majority of 164 against 148 deputies. On 16 March, US President George W. Bush said on US television that the Spanish electorate had “cowered” to the Islamist terrorists presumed to be responsible for the Madrid attack. This was an idea shared, echoed, or even anticipated by a good number of conservative media in the US and also by politicians in the Bush camp. The Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, J. Dennis Hastert, was quoted by the New York Times as saying: “They changed their government because of the perception of a threat. Here’s a country who stood against terrorism and had a huge terrorist act within their country and they chose to change their government and to, in a sense, appease terrorists” (Sanger and Johnston A10). The same New York Times piece, however, reports that another member of the Bush administration, Richard L. Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State, took the opposite perspective: “the vote that propelled the Socialists into power in Spain. . . was a protest by the people against the handling of the terrorist event by the sitting government of Spain” (A10).1 For some, then, if not for all, the “cowering” of the Spanish people would explain the massive withdrawal of electoral support from the Popular Party, which was committed to sustaining the current US administration’s policy in Iraq and elsewhere, and the equally massive new support for the Socialists, who had pledged long before their victory that, if victorious in the elections, they would pull the Spanish troops out of Iraq and withdraw from the US-led coalition unless a United Nations mandate could be obtained by June 2004.