The Spanish vote complicates our own electoral politics enormously.

The risk for the Bush administration is that any criticism of the critics of our Iraq policy looks like dragging out the blanket of patriotism to smother legitimate debate and dissent.

The risk for John Kerry is that he may not be able to mobilize the anti-war wing of his party without signalling weakness to Al-Qaida. The Democratic wing of the Democratic party, as Howard Dean is fond of saying, regards our intervention in Iraq as a mistake. As Dean still maintains, Al-Qaida is now active in Iraq only because we are active in Iraq. If that is so, does it not imply that new acts of terrorism here or against our allies are merely the predicted fruit of our folly?

Is this how most Americans would view it? More importantly, is this how Al-Qaida believes we would view it? If one watches CNN's daily dose of defeatism and woe-is-me stories in its coverage of Iraq, I can see how Al-Qaida might well conclude that American public opinion may be moving against the war, and that a few bombs might be just the thing needed to topple Bush.

Yet how do we talk about these things without being accused of confusing dissent with disloyalty, or without inviting the very thing we wish to avoid?

I think the Spanish vote may have other deadly unintended consequences. The Spanish have their own problems with terror acts perpetrated by ETA. However, past ETA tactics (based on media reports I have read over the past several days) have only focused on political and military targets. The Spanish voter's message is loud and un-misstaken, spectacular acts of bloody killing sprees work. I'm afraid for the Spanish that ETA was also listening.

You may well be right. I do not know enough about the internal situation in Spain to assess what lessons ETA will draw from the election, or how Spaniards will react to more ETA violence. But the fact that the conservatives were more anxious to blame ETA for the bombings than Al-Qaida, may reflect a greater toughness (or at least less fear)regarding ETA.

The appeasement noises coming from all over Europe seems to indicate that the European elites are truly demoralized by the Madrid bombings. It amazes me that they cannot see that this is like pouring blood into shark-infested waters.