Jonathan Freedland in today's Guardian compounds the egregious errors of that paper's leader line by spectacularly missing the point about the Spanish election result. Taking issue with Andrew Sullivan's devastating demolition of the Guardian line (see below), Freedland resorts to the knee-jerk smear of 'McCarthyism' in objecting to the characterisation of his and the paper's position as appeasement. But the guts of his argument, that Sullivan's side (and my own) has misunderstood democracy and falsely conflated Iraq and al Q'aeda, displays a total misunderstanding on his own part.

He writes: 'For surely the Spanish did nothing more on Sunday than exercise their democratic right to change governments. They elected the Socialist party; to suggest they voted for al-Qaida is a slur not only on the Spanish nation but on the democratic process itself, implying that when terrorists strike political choice must end.'

This argument sets up a quite breath-taking straw man. No-one has suggested that the Spanish voted for al Q'aeda. What happened was that the Spanish voted in a manner engineered by al Qa'eda. Had the bombings not occurred, the election result would almost certainly have been quite different. Al Q'aeda set a trap and the Spanish duly fell right in. Democracy, in other words, was suborned. That is why it was a victory not for democracy but for terror. The Spanish are being accused not of being al Q'aeda's fellow travellers, but their useful idiots.

His next point is equally misguided:

'The right's greater error is its failure to distinguish between the war against al-Qaida and the war on Iraq. About 90% of the Spanish electorate were against the latter; there is no evidence that they were, or are, soft on the former...The Spanish electorate were not voting for a cave-in to al-Qaida. On the contrary, many of those who opposed the war in Iraq did so precisely because they feared it would distract from the more urgent war against Islamist fanaticism. (Witness the US military resources pulled off the hunt for Bin Laden in Afghanistan and diverted to Baghdad.) Nor was it appeasement to suggest that the US-led invasion of an oil-rich, Muslim country would make al-Qaida's recruitment mission that much easier.

'Of course, this is not to argue that if only the war had not happened then Bin Laden and his henchmen would have laid down their arms. Al-Qaida's leaders are murderous, guilty of the most wicked acts; nothing we can do will reach them. But that is not true of the many thousands, perhaps millions, drawn to the message of extreme Islamism; the people who would never plant bombs, but might cheer when they go off. These are the hearts and minds that have to be won over if the war on terror is ever to be won. To assert that the conflict over Iraq made that task harder is not a surrender; it is a statement of the obvious.

'It may be comforting, but this struggle cannot be won by painting the world in black and white, with America as the good guy and everyone else cast as terrorists or their allies. It will require nimble, subtle thinking - constantly making awkward but essential distinctions. So, yes, it is quite true that al-Qaida will be chillingly gratified by the Spanish result but, no, that does not mean that Spaniards voted for al-Qaida. Similarly, it is quite possible to be strongly opposed to the Iraq adventure and militantly in favour of the war against Bin Laden - indeed the two sentiments can be strongly linked. There is a difference, too, between appeasing men of violence and seeking to limit their appeal, just as the leaders of global terror must be separated from those who could become their followers.'

Oh dear oh dear. What muddled thinking. No-one is suggesting the Spanish are soft on al Q'aeda, or are in any way other than viscerally opposed to it -- another version of the straw man above. But the Spanish did believe that had Spain not supported the coalition in Iraq, Madrid would not have been bombed. This is almost certainly false. Spain was explicitly targeted before the war on Iraq. And like many others on his side of the argument, Freedland conveniently ignores completely the mighty inconvenient fact that in its post-atrocity video al Q'aeda claimed it was retaliating not just for Iraq but for Afghanistan. In other words, by seeking to punish and remove the perpetrators of 9/11 -- and even the appeaseniks don't claim there was 'no link' between the Taleban and 9/11 -- the US made itself a 'legitimate' target for Islamist terror.

In other words again, al Q'aeda will use the west's demonstrably just attempt to defend itself against mass murder on an industrial scale as a pretext for further murderous attacks. Yet for Freedland, a public which implicitly accepts this demented and tyrannical logic by agreeing to blame not the perpetrators of the Madrid bombing but its own government as the real culprits is to be applauded.

Moreover, his claim that Islamist terrorism has been strengthened by the Iraq war is the classic argument of appeasement. Yes, it is probably true that -- although it seems that the core of al Q'aeda has been significantly degraded by the attrition waged against it -- other extremists have been sucked into the jihadist cause. But this is like blaming the Blitz, or the arrival of Japan on the side of the fascists, on the decision to go to war against Germany in the first place. The crucial point missed by Freedland is that war was declared upon the west, not the other way round. His comic-strip bogeymen of 'the right' weren't the aggressors here, although you might be forgiven for thinking they were by reading the Guardian -- they have been trying instead to defend their society against attack.

But the key point is this. Since the Islamist world inverts cause and effect so that it presents its own unprovoked attacks on the west as defence, while the west's real self-defence is misrepresented as aggression, it follows that whatever the west does to defend itself will become a rallying cry for more to sign up to the jihad. The logic of Freedland's argument, therefore, is that if the west is attacked, it should do nothing to defend itself for fear of swelling the enemy's numbers. Probably appeasement is not the right word for this. The right word is surrender.

And the point about Iraq, for the unmpteenth time, was this. Although there is no prooof that Sadam was in cahoots with al Q'aeda, the idea that he was therefore not a direct threat to the west is an absurd, ignorant and lethal non-sequitur. His Iraq was a cockpit of terror. He had tried to murder the first President Bush. He ran advanced training academies for terrorists in the desert. He funded them. He was intent on developing WMD. He wanted to become the leader of the Arab world, which would have put him perforce at the head of the Islamic jihad. He declared revenge upon the west for interrupting his strategy for achieving this aim by kicking him out of Kuwait. 9/11 showed that the milieu in which he was swimming was capable of acts which had previously been unthinkable; and so therefore the threat which by common consent Saddam was thought to pose -- but which had previously been only feebly addressed -- suddenly was revealed as a threat that could not be responsibly entertained for a moment longer. This particular cockpit of Arab and Muslim terror had to be destroyed, and fast.

And if denying this historic reality is wilful, proof of a link between Iraq and Islamist terror is being played out now in front of our eyes by the very deed that causes Freedland to reassert its non-existence. For the aim of the Madrid bombings was to fracture the coalition in Iraq. The reason for that is that for the Islamists, the prospect of Iraq emerging as stable, peaceful, prosperous and above all free is insupportable because it will be a powerful blow against the tyrannies of the Arab world which feed it -- precisely the thinking of the American 'right' Freedland demonises. Iraq, a former crucible of Arab terror, is now the pivot in the attempt to destroy that terror. To say there is no link between the two is risible.

The similarities between these arguments and those mounted in the 1930s, by people who did not grasp the threat posed by Nazi Germany and thought 'jaw-jaw' was better than 'war-war', are uncanny. These are indeed the all too familiar weasel words of appeasement.