“I wouldn’t have told everyone that the isssue was WMD. Because then I wouldn’t have had people like me, who believed Blair, accepted the war, but then felt lied to later. This isn’t Metis, it is dishonesty.”

No, it’s politics. All politics is, by definition, pandering and attempting to build coalitions out of what would naturally be incompatible interests. If the various interests weren’t at least partly incompatible, politicking would not be necessary.

You get as many as you can on your side with your whole story. If short of a workable majority, you shade and twist to suit the next sliver of the franchise at closest remove. You once again check for a workable majority. Lather, rinse, repeat…

Bernard Guerrero, cheerful cynic

Look RSN, as you may have noticed I’m a bit hard to pin down, or to stereotype. I would not have been against this idea except for three things:

1/. I wouldn’t have told everyone that the isssue was WMD. Because then I wouldn’t have had people like me, who believed Blair, accepted the war, but then felt lied to later. This isn’t Metis, it is dishonesty.

2/. I wouldn’t have used force to achieve this, since my understanding of the inter-ethnic trilemma, which is fearfully reminiscent of the Spanish problem in enormous dimensions, makes imposed democracy very difficult to obtain. I would have used direct economic intervention, trade, investment etc…..much more subtle, and much more effective in my view. This may be difficult to swallow, but it seems you need sunni nationalism to serve as some sort of pillar. The China strategy of transforming Baath from the inside may have been the best bet. Then again, I am no Iraq expert, and I would have asked some of the experts.

3/. I would have tied this to a much stronger intervention in the Israel Palestine conflict. Without a permanent solution there, I don’t see stable democracy in Iraq whatever else you do.

The real point is that ‘neocon’ by its very nature is ideological, metis is complex but pragmatic. Trojan horses are fine, but absolute transparency with your own supporters is a condition.

Also you would have needed to convince the world that this was Metis (on behalf of the planet), and not mere Kerdos. IE your self-sacrifice, and absence of direct interests (even on things like the corporate level) would have needed to have been made much plainer.

There might have been a way of doing all of this by not having used WMD’s, handing the political authority to the UN from day one and not later when things started to run into problems, maintaining the Baath infrastructure intact, and then moving on directly to apply all the undivided pressure and US attention imaginable to achieving a middle east peace. But then, history is full of might have beens.

If the Spain Al Qaeda hypothesis is at all eventually confirmed we may already be entering a new chapter.

I know this will sound very off-putting to European ears, but I see the neo-con strategy of using democratic Iraq as a transformative force for the entire Arab/Muslim world as a form of metis.

The strategy has been thought about for a long time - more than a decade. What’s interesting is that Europe has largely ignored the discussion, even though it was quite publicly accessible here in the US.

The biggest opponents to the effort, however, seem to be organized media: AP, Reuters, BBC, Arab state sponsored media. And the interesting way they attack the effort - it’s clumsy, it’s American, it’s not working, it’s against international law, it’s Bush, etc. - seems to be an effort to deny the essential… metis, inherent in the effort.

If you want some idea of what the atmosphere is like, here’s a piece in English - which is not far removed from some of the normal invective - from a US blogger based in Spain:

“Josep Lluis Carod-Rovira, a notable piece of dogshit in human form and leader of Esquerra Republicana, the Catalan independentistas, had this to say”

John Chappel
http://www.iberiannotes.blogspot.com/2004_03_07_iberiannotes_archive.html#107911230121724590

Now I’m no supporter of ERC, but Carod is a democrat and a pacifist, so I think this kind of stuff is totally out of place, especially if you are really interested in the 200 people who died.

It is anti-Catalan diatribe at its worst.

I’ve answered your question, but I haven’t answered it. The big issue is what Weber would call a legitimation problem, I guess.

The last 8 years of government would offer a large part of the answer.

This government has divided Spanish society in a way that it is difficult to understand from outside.

The style of government, the arrogance with information.

On the Iraq war, to take one example, not on the issue of the war itself, which is also there, but on the way informing the Spanish people has been handled. Many make the point that whilst both Bush and Blair have accepted that the issue of intelligence information on WMD’s is a legitimate topic of investigation, this has been consistently denied here. (Indeed, thinking carefully about it, it may well be that the clinging to the Eta hypothesis is not an attempt to win the election, as some suggest, but an attempt to shield Spain from the exterior spotlight, since what may be found may not be too attractive).

Forget terrorism for a moment, and think about Gibraltar and Prestige.

In the former case the British position was characterised as defending drug dealers and mafias. There was no understanding at all about letting the inhabitants decide. It was assumed that Britain could just tell the population ‘you go to them’ since they were simply tradeable ‘chattel’. There was no idea that they may have had rights. So if Britain didn’t do this, there must have been mafia interests putting pressure. This is how things are seen here.

More than left and right, the expression Caciqueism comes to mind.

On the Prestige, don’t believe me, go consult the Financial Times, which had to run an ‘it’s a lie’ article on the front page to refute Spanish allegations of British responsibility for the ship.

So I think you need to understand this recent background. This complete insensitivity for legitimate demands for accurate information. This history of advancing one idea, and then retracting, if you want to see why so many people refuse to believe the ‘official version’.

A society with this kind of ‘Legitimation Crisis’ has to be very vulnerable to any kind of terrorist attack.

I will say more about some of this when the election results are a bit clearer, since I am not going to engage in explicit electoralism. As I have said, I think this is wrong.

But let me leave you with this. Many have recently criticised extensively the BBC, but would that we had at least the BBC here in Spain.

Democracy depends on having an active and trusted fourth estate. This we do not have.

This is there, but you also have the divisions of the so called ‘historic nationalities’: the Basque Country, Galicia, Catalonia.

Thanks to the massive internal immigration in the 60’s and now again the external immigration of the last 3 years there are 7 million people in Catalonia, out of a total of 40 million. The PP here has about 15% of the vote: ie it virtually doesn’t exist. The biggest novely is the way Aznar has driven the Spanish speaking grandchildren of the 60’s migration into advocating separatism. They don’t feel understood, and they feel very aggrieved and wounded by all the anti-Catalan propaganda of the last few weeks.

One new factor here is instant messaging: the young people have fallen virtually completely outside the influence of the traditional media. The PP have certainly lost the war for the hearts and minds here.

The PP leaders were literally booed and whistled as they tried to join the demonstration here in Barcelona.

Even in Andalusia, if the PP have an absolute majority next time, the demand for increased regional autonomy may become very strong indeed.

So Spain, I would say, is very, very divided.

And remember, whoever is finally found to be responsible for this outrage, peaceful Basque nationalism is preparing to demand independence, so it is a very difficult situation all round.

You wrote earlier that one section of Spanish society wants to believe ETA was responsible, while another wants to blame Al Qaeda. Is this the analogous / similar / identical to the “two Spains” thesis, the right/left divisions dating back to the Spanish Civil War?