It is important to keepopn about Iraq, to keep working contrary opinions against each oher,surfacing facts and intrpretations thatcan make a difference.there is no easy path now. This From Mario Vargas Llosa Saturday March 27, 2004 The Guardian
What is going to happen now in Spain, with the new government of Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero? In economic policy, probably nothing. Fortunately for everyone, the Spanish Socialists are now a party much more liberal than socialist, their economic approach being essentially similar to that of Aznar's Popular party, so that everything indicates that support for the market economy, private enterprise and the insertion of Spain into world markets will continue, though with different rhetoric and faces. It seems impossible that the country could now return to the populism of lamented memory, or to corrupting interventionism. In this ambit, at least, the progress attained in the past eight years should continue.
In international policy, Zapatero proposes a prudent, non-acrid distancing from the United States, to approach the version of Europe personified by France and Germany. This may mean much or little, apart from insubstantial gestures. The latter is the best that could happen to Spain, of course, if it does not wish to lose the international role it has attained in recent years and return to its previous role of nobody, or at most an obscure acolyte of France, without presence or voice.
The announcement made by Zapatero that he will withdraw the Spanish troops from Iraq unless the UN takes charge of the situation has in my view been a mistake, as pointed out by senator Kerry, who is likely to be the next president of the United States. The new leader's opposition to the invasion, perfectly legitimate, is one thing; another is the presence of Spanish soldiers in that country, where they are not fighting but on a mission of peace as generous and noble as that of the same troops in Afghanistan, ex-Yugoslavia and the Latin American countries where they train police and soldiers to act in democracy.
To withdraw them now, when according to the Oxford Research International survey published on March 17, 70% of Iraqis declare that (despite the monstrous attacks) their life has improved since they were relieved of Saddam Hussein, is an unjust, unfriendly act to the millions of Iraqis who, like millions of Spaniards in the times of Franco, desire to live in peace and liberty, and also, a message that not only al-Qaida and its demented killers, but the democratic countries themselves would interpret as a surrender to terror, admitting that by placing bombs and killing innocent people they achieve what they want. The Iraq war is in the past. What is now at stake there is a slow and difficult transition to democracy, and a country like Spain, with a new socialist government, cannot cease to lend a hand in this process toward legality and liberty for the Iraqi people.
