Necessity and virtue of the "No to war"

MadridThe attack by the United States and Israel on Iran has given Pedro Sánchez an opportunity to reconnect with a broad segment of the Spanish electorate. But this is not the only reason why he has opted for this path. Speculation about the opportunism of the government's decision and its president soon began. The hypothesis of a triple call to the polls has even been considered, which would coincide the Andalusian regional elections, next June, with an early general election and the Catalan elections. These are premature calculations. Given the state of the legislature – with no possibility of approving budgets or promoting important reforms that require the processing of bills –, it would be logical for Sánchez to take advantage of the first opportunity in which he had some favorable expectation of passing a new electoral test. But he will have to be careful, because in times of a warlike scenario and much uncertainty and instability due to the questioning of international legality, it becomes more difficult to predict electoral movements. Also, the option that the socialist leader has now taken is due to his versatility in making a virtue of necessity, an expression that he himself used in the federal committee of his party to justify the amnesty law for Catalan independentist leaders.

The necessity arises in this case from the beginning of a war on which it is inevitable and essential to take a position. Virtue, on the other hand, consists in having taken a path that responds to the recent history of the country and its majority inclinations. Spain has not developed a tradition of participation in armed conflicts abroad in this period. It has been a long time since the loss of the empire on which the sun never set. In fact, successive governments in this almost half-century of recovered democracy have had a lot of work to do to be persuasive every time troops were sent abroad, emphasizing that they were humanitarian operations or surveillance and interposition between warring parties, as a guarantee of peace preservation. The great exception was the presidency of José María Aznar, with support for the Iraq War and intervention on the island of Perejil to dislodge a handful of Moroccan Royal Guard personnel.

The Azores photo

Obviously, these were two matters of very different natures, although the latter could have become complicated. The US Secretary of State in 2002, Colin Powell, used to say that he did not quite understand the strong tension accumulated regarding the island of Perejil, which he referred to as “this stupid island”, a resounding expression that is understood well enough without translation. Infinitely more serious was the chapter of support for the invasion of Iraq and the Azores photo, with Aznar supporting George Bush and Tony Blair. Aznar summarized more than once the meaning of his support for that war by saying that his purpose was “to pull Spain out of the corner of history”. But in that case too, the US government acted outside international legality. The PSOE knew how to take full advantage of this. Zapatero would have had a harder time reaching Moncloa without the PP government's involvement in the Iraq war and without the mistakes made by its members in attributing the attacks on the Atocha trains to ETA, which were carried out by a commando calling itself Brigadas Abu Hafz al-Masri, linked to the Islamist terrorist organization Al-Qaeda. The detonation of ten backpacks loaded with explosives on three Madrid commuter trains caused 191 deaths and 2,057 injuries.

From the socialist ranks, they had never gone so far regarding the intervention of troops abroad. On the contrary, every time an operation of this kind was considered, justifications similar to the current ones were heard to explain the sending of a frigate to Cyprus. These were always protection interventions, defensive in nature in any case, and in accordance with Spain's international commitments, with full respect for legality. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the government had difficulty justifying the use of US bases in the actions taken to reverse the situation. It was in this way that in 1991 the offensive called “Desert Storm” began, which was carried out by an international coalition led by the United States. The Spanish government always said that its participation had been limited to the “logistical support” provided to the Americans with the use of jointly used bases.

The distance from Trump

With Sánchez as president of the government, now not even that. Of course, there is a substantial difference with those events of the 1990s. The invasion of Kuwait was condemned by the UN Security Council, which demanded the withdrawal of troops from Iraq in resolutions that were not heeded. Now the attack launched by the United States and Israel against the Iranian regime has disregarded the legal framework of the United Nations. The risks that Spain assumes would be possible reprisals. Trump has acted unilaterally, only in coordination with the government of Tel Aviv, which under Netanyahu has been demanding radical action for years to end the threat of an Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Europe had not supported an initiative of this kind, not even as a remote hypothesis.

The Spanish executive had already been very critical of Trump and Netanyahu regarding the invasion of Gaza, emphasizing its condemnation of the attacks organized by Hamas against Israel. In the same way that now it highlights its condemnation of the ayatollah regime and the systematic violation of human rights in Iran. Sánchez's “No to war” stance, in short, allows him to escape any warmongering image and, through this route, to cut off any significant problems with the parties to his left. But it is not a strategy that should be read solely in terms of domestic policy. It is an ethical commitment for which he may pay a high price if he wants to make a place for himself in the international arena in the future. What is needed is for Sánchez to appear before Congress to provide – as has already been requested – exhaustive explanations and to provoke a debate in which everyone will have to present what their alternatives would have been.