Just Being Polite
Remember that big pre-war meeting between Bush, Blair and Aznar? The one that showed we were all 3 big powerful important allies in this multi-lateral effort? It will be fun to see how quickly the Bush team starts reassuring us that the effectiveness of the "international" coalition will not be diminished, now that Spain is getting out of Dodge. Under charges that the Iraq war was a unilateral invasion, Spain was one of the first 2 words out of Rumsfeld's mouth trying to convince us otherwise, as if they played a major role militarily and diplomatically. But now the Pentagon won't want us feeling any more vulnerable than we already know we are, so they'll have to convince us that we're not hurt by their absence, that Spain was an inessential bit player, which really was the truth all along. We were just inflating their role to be polite, right?

On a similar topic, Calpundit is afraid that the weekend election results in Spain could be a victory for terrorists:

"If (if!) the Spanish electorate was punishing Aznar solely because they perceived his actions as being anti-terrorist enough to provoke an al-Qaeda attack, the terrorists have accomplished their goal: the Spanish public has shown that if they are attacked they will vote against a politician who strongly opposed the terrorists."