In an interview earlier this week, John McCain would not answer whether he would be willing to meet with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. While some speculated that McCain either did not know who Zapatero was or thought he was some “Latin American bad guy,” McCain’s top foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann said McCain was not confused — he was simply articulating his policy of refusing to commit to a White House meeting with Zapatero.

The logic behind this particular policy is baffling, considering that Spain has long been a U.S. NATO ally and currently has troops in Afghanistan. So why would McCain shun Zapatero? If President Bush’s actions towards the Spanish Prime Minster give some indication, the answer is Iraq.

Zapatero withdrew Spain’s troops from Iraq soon after his Socialist Party swept to power in March, 2004 in a wave of Spanish anti-war sentiment, a move that reportedly angered Bush:

Zapatero’s first action was to make good on a long-standing campaign promise to remove Spanish troops from Iraq, to the overwhelming approval of Spaniards but the great irritation of Bush.

Eighteen months later, there has still been no one-on-one meeting between the two leaders, and rhetoric has been harsh. It got so bad at one point that Bush refused to take Zapatero’s phone call of congratulations last year after the president won reelection.

Since then, the White House has said Bush has “no plans” to meet with Zapataro. In 2006, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley could not answer why the two leaders have not visited one another:

QUESTION: Is that the reason why there seems to be like a veto against our Prime Minister, Mr. Zapatero, who is an ally and has been Prime Minister for two years but hasn’t come to Washington yet?

MR. HADLEY: He has not come to Washington, that’s true. Whether that is a result of bad public opinion polls in Spain about the United States, I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that. But there’s — at this point, I don’t think there’s any plans for a visit.

Just last March, when Press Secretary Dana Perino was asked if Bush would congratulate Zapataro on his re-election, she would not fully commit: “I expect he’ll be sending a message to him, sure.”

McCain’s incoherent answer to whether he would meet with Zapatero may indicate that he is interested in making Bush’s grudge against Spain permanent U.S. policy. As Max Bergmann notes, it is “beyond reckless” that McCain would refuse to meet with a democratic U.S. ally that has had soldiers killed in Afghanistan, was brutally attacked by Al-Qaeda and wields considerable influence in Europe and Latin America.

Perhaps Spain won’t be expecting an invitation to McCain’s League of Democracies?

Digg It!

The Washington Post confirms that yesterday’s terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Sanaa was the work of an Al Qaeda affiliate, using tactics developed in Iraq:

The use of two vehicle bombs — one to breach the perimeter of a compound, a second to drive inside and explode — is a tactic used by the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. [...]

He said a new, less-compromising generation of al-Qaeda leaders emerged, many of them moving into action after escaping from a Yemeni prison that year, he said.[...]

The new leaders have found followers among al-Qaeda fighters returning from Iraq. “The quieter it is in Iraq, the more inflamed it is here,” as Yemeni fighters travel back and forth, said Nabil al-Sofee, a former spokesman for a Yemeni Islamist political party who is now an analyst.

Those who have been following the Iraq debate might remember “flypaper theory,” which was one of the earliest exponents of the “incoherent post hoc justifications for the Iraq war” genre. The idea was that there was some limited number of terrorists in the Middle East, and the presence of an occupying U.S. army would lure them to Iraq, whereupon they could all be conveniently killed, presumably as soon as they stepped off the bus.

This plan was prevented from working only by the fact that it was staggeringly dumb. The U.S. occupation radicalized scores of young Muslims, many of whom traveled to Iraq, where they learned terror warfare and were galvanized in the global jihad. And now they’ve begun returning home, to share the tactics and technology developed in a laboratory we provided for them by invading Iraq. The violence in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon in May 2007 was one instance of this. Yesterday’s attack in Yemen is another.

Various Bush administration courtiers have tried to spin the containment of Al Qaeda in Iraq as a vindication of the invasion of Iraq, eliding the fact that Al Qaeda in Iraq was a direct consequence of America in Iraq. By mispresenting Al Qaeda as a single, united faction under the command of Osama bin Laden — rather than a collection of factions gathered beneath the banner of global jihad — Bush and his supporters have misrepresented successes against AQI as if they represented successes against Al Qaeda as a whole. In doing this, they have ignored the ideological and propaganda components of Al Qaeda’s continuing operations in the region, and the ways in which the Iraq war has profited both.

In an interview with the Omaha World-Herald, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) questioned whether John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, has the experience to be president of the United States:

“I do think in a world that is so complicated, so interconnected and so combustible, you really got to have some people in charge that have some sense of the bigger scope of the world,” Hagel said. “I think that’s just a requirement.”

So is Palin qualified to be president?

“I think it’s a stretch to, in any way, to say that she’s got the experience to be president of the United States,” Hagel said.

In a recent interview with ABC News, Palin explained her national security credentials by claiming, “You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.” Hagel said that such answers are “insulting to the American people”:

“I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, ‘I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia,’” he said. “That kind of thing is insulting to the American people.”

Hagel, who is retiring from the Senate, concluded that Palin “doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials.” “You get a passport for the first time in your life last year?” he asked. “I mean, I don’t know what you can say. You can’t say anything.”

Hagel has traveled to Iraq six times, most recently accompanying Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Jack Reed (D-RI). While on the trip, Hagel repeated his calls for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. “It is now time for the United States to start accepting the sovereignty of that country in ways that are real,” he said. “And that means for us to responsibly start unwinding our military presence.”

Digg It!