To the Editor:
Peter Chen's column, "Cowardly Spain," (The Dartmouth, May 17) asserts that the Spanish pull-out from Iraq was an act of cowardice. This is false. If you look at the early exit poll results, several of them showed Jose Maria Aznar's Popular Party winning, which turned out to be inaccurate. Isn't it therefore quite possible that polls done by the same organizations in the week before the election that showed the PP winning were inaccurate, and that the Spanish were preparing to elect a Socialist government before the attacks of March 11? PM Aznar sent Spanish troops to war with less than 10 percent of his population supporting him, so isn't it possible and even desirable that the Spanish people expressed their dissatisfaction by ousting him?
I understand that the Spanish pull-out puts greater strain on the U.S. troops and may send a signal to terrorist groups. But Zapatero was the Spanish people's choice, and he was clearly chosen for a very specific reason.
Sometimes representative democracy actually has to mean representing the will of the people who are voting, not Washington policymakers' idea of a courageous stance. That is something we must not lose sight of as a representative government begins to take shape in Iraq, if that government is to have any credibility in the eyes of the Iraqi people.
