THE ELECTION VICTORY of Spain's antiwar Socialists in the wake of al Qaeda bombings has left American commentators worried. The war on terrorism, it seems, is endangered by what Italy's Corriere della Sera calls "the spirit of Munich . . . blowing across Europe." And that spirit appeared to be blowing at gale force on Thursday morning, when Poland's president Aleksander Kwasniewski told a radio station that his country's troops might pull out of Iraq ahead of schedule, in early 2005. That afternoon, he complained about American intelligence failures in Iraq to a group of French journalists. "We were misled with the information on weapons of mass destruction," he said, later adding, "This is the problem of the United States, of Britain, and also of many other nations."
When the story was trumpeted in the international press as evidence that America's antiterrorist coalition was crumbling, Kwasniewski backtracked, professing himself "very disappointed" that incoming Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero would bring Spanish forces back from Iraq. And Kwasniewski's staff sought to defuse the controversy by telling the Warsaw daily Rzeczpospolita the next day that Agence France-Presse was to blame. The Polish word that was translated as "misled" or "led into error," staffers insisted, would have been better rendered by "tantalized" or "deceived." Whether or not this is a distinction with a difference, the official Polish Press Agency (PAP) had translated the word exactly as AFP had: "misled." The same story had apparently been fed to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice,
who said she thought the Poles had been "a bit misinterpreted." A State Department spokesman added, "This isn't something that worries us."
It should be. The problem is not simply that Poles oppose their country's mission in Iraq by 53 percent to 42 percent, according to a mid-March survey taken by the Polish company CBOS. It is not simply that the Spanish troops Zapatero has promised to withdraw serve in the Polish sector, and their departure will cause real logistical difficulties. It is not simply that senators from both parties in the ruling coalition--the Union of Labor and prime minister Leszek Miller's Democratic Left Alliance--held a press conference on Thursday to urge withdrawal, complaining that Poland's leaders, "in the face of firm opposition by France and Germany, sped us into a war for which there is neither social approval nor money."
The big problem is that, in terms of European Union politics, Poland's interests and Spain's are more tightly linked than the interests of any other pair of member countries. These two are the E.U.'s Siamese twins. As one goes, the other very well may follow.
Poland's and Spain's fates were joined by accident at the E.U.'s Nice summit in December 2000, when German chancellor Gerhard Schröder sought to increase his country's representation on the E.U. Council of Ministers. Until Nice, the "big four" countries (France, Germany, Britain, Italy) had all had the same weight in votes, since they had virtually identical populations--60 million, give or take. With the addition of the East German lands, however, Germany was now a third larger than the others.
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