Spain PM-elect: Troops out of Iraq

[minionofmidas]

Well, the Spanish never went to Iraq to defeat Saddam. They came to late for that. They went there to prop up Bush in the American public eye, by making him look less isolated.
That is not a legitimate aim to endanger your soldiers for. (Spain has had 11 casualties so far, and it's 1300 contingent does not fulfill any function.) Of course they'll be withdrawn. What else?
They've said the details will be worked out later, but yep, they're aiming at bringing the boys home. Expect them to go only as soon as some other country's replaced them.

[minionofmidas]

The PP wasn't booted out because there was a terrorist attack but because they lied about it and tried to make it look as if it was their favourite enemy when everybody knew it wasn't.
Imagine some Right Wing, Militia nut blows off a big one in the US a week before the election and Bush tries to blame it on Al-Quaeda, then you have a scenario comparable to what happened in Spain.
So, guys, your conclusion is flawed because your premise is totally flawed.

And the PSOE is withdrawing from Iraq because they'd said all along that's what they were going to do. Changing that because of a terrorist attack would be giving in to the terrorists.

[minionofmidas]

Several reasons, I guess...Hard to figure out what's the most important one...
Basically...
1) Aznar has put a lot of pressure on ETA during his term in office. Defeating them once and for all was pretty much his aim in office
One may say he's got a personal vendetta with Basque nationalism. I think he's also got a bigoted, quasi-racist problem with Basques themselves, he's made remarks that sound like that.
2) A majority of the voters support him on ETA, but not on Iraq. So I guess someone at PP headquarters must've thought that if it was ETA, that should help them in the polls, but if it was Islamists, people might say it's because Aznar's vocal support for Bush made them a target (although that's assuming Al-Qaeda cares about Saddam Hussein, possibly a rather large assumption in itself). So they may have blamed it on ETA, hoping nothing would contradict them. I'm assuming that at this point they did not have a clue who it was, unlike right now where nothing points to ETA.
This strategy just blew up in their faces, partly due to tactical errors of their own: Aznar getting the UN to condemn ETA without any evidence and his ordering ambassadors to argue the case all over the world went down very badly with the Spanish electorate. The latter thing, especially, reminded Spaniards of a similar order of Aznar's during the build-up to the Iraq war, when he told them to spread the claim Saddam had ties with Al-Qaeda - right after reading a report by his own secret service that put the credibility of this claim at zero.
So, it was like "He's lieing again! This is the last straw!" to many people who opposed the war but don't normally vote. Remember, turnout went up from 68,7% to 77,2%. The PP's share of the vote went down 6,9%, but it's share of the electorate just 1,5%, it's just that so much more people voted for the opposition.

[minionofmidas]

Well, they did push for and get that vote. (Of course, it's just a toothless resolution, I know, but this is politics of symbols, not acts...) And there was no evidence for ETA involvement at the time, though there was less evidence for the contrary than there is now.