As we noted a few days ago, the vagaries of public opinion are simply too great to accurately measure the response to such a traumatic event as the Madrid bombings over such a short period of time as three days.
But this article in Wednesday’s Washington Post makes a strong argument that much of the public tide against the Aznar government wasn’t based on anger at him for putting the country in harm’s way over Iraq but rather because he tried to deceive the country after the attacks themselves occurred.
(In practice, I suspect both melded together in the public mind.)
This story has been coming into focus slowly in the English-language press (though it was already roiling the Spanish press in the 24 hours just before the election). And the Post piece advances it substantially.
Aznar’s government immediately blamed ETA for the bombings based on very little evidence and continued to insist on the ETA theory of the crime even as more and more evidence piled up pointing to an Islamist link.
Aznar himself personally and repeatedly called several major national dailies to press the point that ETA was responsible. As doubts were beginning to mount, Aznar twice called the editor of one Catalan daily El Periodico and “courteously cautioned [the editor] not to be mistaken. ETA was responsible.”
Certainly, given Spain’s history, a quick rush-to-judgment about ETA’s culpability would neither be surprising nor evidence of bad faith. But the article makes a rather good case that there was a coordinated and cynical effort to misdirect public suspicion.
In other words, faced with a great national tragedy, the government tried to deceive the public in order to achieve a political end — something that is paradoxically heartening since it suggests that, all the recent unpleasantness aside, we Americans and our European brethren seem to share quite a lot in common after all.
