  News David Brooks's urlLink Op-ed in today's Times charges the Spanish electorate with appeasing terrorist the world over by voting the Socialists in to power in Sunday's elections. While Brooks concedes the possibility that unrelated domestic factors actually determined the election, he unambiguously believes that the perception of the vote will be that of Spaniards capitulating to terrorists exacting retribution for Spain's support of the United States. All of this seems at first like egocentric American hysteria. The Popular Party is a right-of-center party, which has traditionally not been in power in Spain's post-Franco history. The government had also fallen out of favor with the electorate as early as a year ago, when there were massive protests against Spain's sending troops to Iraq. One can conclude that the Spanish electorate had plenty of other reasons to be pissed-off with the current government, and that its ousting was an overdetermined event.
Moreover, there is the idea particularly on the Left, that the attacks themselves had nothing to do with Spain's relationship with the United States. One increasingly-incredible view is that ETA was, after all, behind the attacks, and that the Al-Qaeda link is some paranoid American conspiracy theory. Another more nuanced position is that various North African Islamist groups have their own long-standing beef with the Spanish government, which though it may haven been aggravated by the Iraq war, was certainly not predicated on it. Thus, although these groups may be behind the attacks in Madrid, Americans are wrong to lump the people and motives behind them together with those of Al-Qaeda and its sympathizers. A couple of things give me pause about these latter two views. The evidence coming in suggest strongly against ETA being the culprit in the attacks. So even if the Al-Qaeda link is a conspiracy theory, it is not a merely American conspiracy theory. In fact, a Socialist urlLink Deputy says that the voters were angry with the government for trying to blame the ETA for the attacks. The same Financial Times article reports that Spanish political analysts are saying that had ETA been responsible for the attacks, then the Popular Party would have easily won the election, as the polls all along showed they would.
The inference to draw from this information is that, rather than being an overdetermined event, the Socialist victory was a direct and proximate result of the terrorist attacks, believed to be perpetrated by groups linked or sympathetic to Al-Qaeda. So, the Spanish people became, overnight, massively more dissatisfied with their government's foreign and security policy, but why?
It seems unlikely that the motivation is simply capitulation out of fear. Rather, one can take the position that Spain's involvement in Iraq is a distraction from the broader fight against extremism and terrorism, and so the Socialists' vocal platform against a continued Spanish presence there would be a stronger rather than weaker stance against terrorism. But Brooks's argument about perception is still a persuasive one. Even if the people who actually attacked Spain couldn't give a monkey about the United States, Iraq, or for the sake of argument, Islam, it is still true that the correlation of events looks very encouraging to future terrorists, even if (or especially if) their interpretation of the events, like Brooks', mine, and the Spanish electorate's, were totally wrong.
One hopes terrorists are more perceptive and sophisticated. 
