MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's previous center-right government "manipulated and twisted" the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 in a bid to salvage general elections three days later, a parliamentary commission found on Wednesday.Atrios has a decent summary of exactly how scarily bad Aznar and the PP actually are.
In a 200-page report after a year of bitter wrangling, the commission accused Jose Maria Aznar's Popular Party (PP) government of ignoring police warnings that its support for the
Iraq war increased the threat from Islamic terrorism in Spain.
My first instinct is to say to Conservatives what real corruption is: Aznar and his bunch were more than happy to twist a national tragedy to win an election. Whatever you think of the Liberals, Gomery's got nothing on this.
I know a lot of people saw Spain's withdrawal from Iraq as "caving" in to terrorism somehow. This is just stupidly wrong. The Socialists were close to winning the election before the bombings occurred, and it was Aznar's obvious criminality pushed the Socialists over the top. Spain's withdrawal was democracy in action, and the fact that it wasn't what some warbloggers wanted doesn't make it "caving" or "defeatism."
The short lesson for governments is this: If you're going to adopt unpopular policies, be prepared to pay the price.
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