Spain and the Bush Doctrine

President Bush has telephoned Spanish President-elect José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to congratulate him on his election victory in Sunday's election.

According to the Spiegel article just linked, Washington is making noises about a possible new UN resolution that would allow Spain and other allies who may be waivering on their troop commitments to consider staying past June 30. My expectations on that are low. Anyone can see that Iraq is a tough, messy situation, and that it's a hostile, dangerous environment.

Other democratic countries will make friendly and encouraging statements in public about such possibilities. But without a very dramatically different arrangement, one that involved a substantive shift of power from the US to the UN as the occupying power, I don't expect any other countries to commit any significant numbers of troops.

Here's where the Bush Administration's wrecked credibility with US allies shows its damage. As Matt Iglesias says at TAPPED:

All of this points toward one of the major pathologies of Bush's reliance on "coalitions of the willing" rather than formal alliances and international institutions. The right deplores the way such organizations constrain America's freedom of action, but the constraining works both ways. If Spain's current operations in Iraq were part of that country's larger, longstanding commitments to NATO or the UN then it's unlikely that a new government would break that commitment over a specific policy dispute with its predecessor. Since Spain's participation in the actual Coalition represented nothing larger than the transient judgment of one political party, however, there's nothing to constrain a new government from changing course.