un-Reason-able

The libertarian magazine Reason has a new article on-line (see here) about the 3/11 bombings in Spain. In it the author decries the punditocracy's condemnation of the results of the election as "appeasement." He talks about how the result of the election was not due to a surrender to terrorist demands and desires, but a result primarily of the increased turn-out due to the attacks and Aznar's transparently political attempts to pin the blame on Basque separatists in the ETA. My thoughts on this were: so what? It doesn't matter why the Spanish voted for the Socialists, it matters if Al Qaeda views it as a victory and will try it again.

The author later makes exactly this same point and then adds "By insisting that the election results constituted capitulation to terror, the hand-wringers are perversely, irresponsibly bringing about the very result they pretend to decry. Why?" This is absurd. Apparently pundits in the U.S. have enormous influence on what Al Qaeda thinks. There can be no doubt that the Islamists view the results of the Spanish election as a victory, and the current War is a zero-sum game so it follows that we lose. The election will hopefully do no lasting harm, but it would be foolish to not realize it for the defeat that it is.