On Sunday night, even as the election returns were coming in, Andrew Sullivan blogged an item titled “Bin Laden’s Victory in Spain.” He argued that al-Qaida had “removed a government intent on fighting terrorism and installed another intent on appeasing it.” By Monday afternoon, it seemed “clear” to Sullivan that “the trend in Europe is now either appeasement of terror or active alliance with it. It is hard to view the results in Spain,” he continued, “as anything but a choice between Bush and al-Qaida. Al-Qaida won.” Meanwhile, in National Review Online, David Frum disdained “the new Spanish government’s swift and abject surrender to the attackers.”

Evidently we’re not all Spaniards anymore.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com jumped right in, slamming Spain as the new France. And we know about those frog-eaters: “French schools should make all haste to permit not just the veil but the burqa,” Hitchens mocked. But as he lanced at the straw man of pusillanimous Euros trying to buy off Islamo-blackmailers, he neglected to note that the French are doing just the opposite of what he accuses them of. It’s the “weak-kneed” French who have banned the veil in public places; indeed, several other “Old Europe” countries are tough-mindedly considering similar prohibitions against Muslim garb.

So maybe the Europeans aren’t weeny weasely “appeasers” — the neocons’ favorite slur word — after all. Maybe the Europeans have learned from the failure of the Crusades and of colonialism; maybe they haven’t allowed a blur of pamphlets from the American Enterprise Institute to blind them to the impossibility of remaking a whole region by force.

But don’t tell David Brooks of the New York Times, who shifts the blame for Spain’s election defection away from his neocon allies and toward — get this — Colin Powell. “Why hasn’t Colin Powell spent the past few years crisscrossing Europe so that voters there would at least know the arguments for the liberation of Iraq?” asks Brooks, blithely assuming that the Europeans know too little, rather than too much. Actually, as demonstrated by the still sliding numbers in the latest Pew Center survey of international attitudes, Europeans increasingly see W. as a pyromaniac fireman, spreading the flames he claims to be extinguishing.

So how will Spain manage without the Bush Doctrine? If having troops in Iraq was a guarantor of safety, do the neocons think that the Spanish erred in not deploying enough of them? By the logic that Bush used after 9/11 — attack a country that didn’t attack the U.S. — maybe the Spanish should find their own bystander nation to attack. Morocco would have been an obvious choice, except that Moroccan nationals did actually kill Spaniards on 3/11. Tunisia, a complete bystander of a country — like Iraq on 9/11 — might do instead. And of course, the always eager Sullivan points toward Iran, Syria, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. But for Brooks, it is unthinkable to admit that Spanish voters, hearing explosions echoing in their capital, might conclude that Spain’s signing on to the Bush Doctrine was, in effect, a declaration of war — and in war, people on both sides get killed.

So who lost Spain? Who thereby gave Old Europe a new lease on life? When Americans were told that toppling Saddam’s regime would transform geopolitics, did anyone think that the next transformed regime would be José María Aznar’s — that “regime change” would ricochet back to Spain? The Bush administration was taken by surprise, of course, because it had chosen to ignore the huge majorities in democracies around the world who never agreed that the “war on terror” could be won in Baghdad.

President Bush pushed the Spanish — and will soon push, probably, the British — to change their government by pursuing policies that have cleaved Europe and America. Europeans, remembering centuries of experience in stomping out separatists, anarchists and fanatics, will now go their own way, without guidance from Paul Wolfowitz. French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, looking like two cats who shared a canary, held a joint press conference in Paris on Tuesday touting their own approach to fighting terrorism; there they offered words of welcome to incoming Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, inducting him into their non-American — maybe anti-American — alliance. David Frum bewailed Europe’s collective-security plan as “a defeat for the antiterrorist cause,” and yet Western Europeans have concluded that stirring hornets nests in faraway places is not the way to keep from being stung.

Which brings us to Tony Blankley in the Washington Times, who gloomily projected a “four in 10 chance that the American electorate will come down with the Spanish disease this November” — that is, boot Bush out of office; the alleged ailment might be called “appeasementitis.” Yup, it’s 1938 all over again, same as it ever was. The historically minded — here comes the dreaded alternative diagnosis of the realists — might point out that al-Qaida is a criminal gang, a cadre of loony loners and conspiratorial crazies scattered across the world. These realists understand that bin Laden’s bunch is not a nation-state with a Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, and Fuhrer. But no speck of realistic thinking seems ever to cloud the eternal 1930s-ness of the neocons’ spotless mind.

Indeed, the most serious consequence of appeasement-accusing is the assumption that goes with it: That counterterrorism strategy and conventional war strategy are one and the same. The war on terror is not World War II; it requires dramatically different actions. The neocon strategists, stalled in the ’30s — searching for Neville Chamberlain tapping his umbrella on every cobblestone street, even as they scout out the next Winston Churchill — are leading us into the bloody land of blowback.

By Thursday, the New York Times’ Tom Friedman weighed in, denouncing the Europeans as — what else? — “the Axis of Appeasement.” In a tone of desperation, he called the present “the most dangerous moment we’ve faced since 9/11.” He espies the neocon house of cards collapsing: The democracy transplant has failed, civil war looms in Iraq, our allies have turned into appeasers, and Bush is still bollixed up in “his discredited argument for the war” — those phantom weapons of mass destruction. So Friedman pipe-dreams of troops, thousands of fresh troops — as if there could ever be “enough armored cars, cell phones, bulletproof vests” poured into Iraq to force that country into becoming a pro-American democracy. Friedman sprays blame at the Pentagon, the Bush team, low taxes and Spanish voters, but never at the flawed enterprise itself. Those who doubt the master plan must be silenced with charges of “dishonor” and, of course, the A-word — “appeasement.”

Yet the plain truth, which the neocons keep trying to purge, is this: Bush’s war in Iraq was bad strategy, if the enemy is al-Qaida. And the search for a better strategy isn’t cowardice, appeasement or surrender.

Maybe Bush-bamboozled Americans will figure that out when bin Laden is finally nailed and nothing changes.

Since Brooks has no qualms about lip-syncing for the inarticulate, I’m happy to provide a similar service for Brooks, subtitling for the all-too-articulate. Indeed, so smooth is Brooks’ gloss on what Bush should have said that I feel I must spell it out for the American people, most of whom don’t read the Times. So here follows a translation of David Brooks’ vision of George W. Bush’s vision, in 10 straight-up simple talking points for the noncognoscenti. And by the way, Mr. President, I hope you’re paying attention this time.

I, David Brooks, say that Bush meant to say:

1. You, the American people, must be afraid. Your level of fear is the measure of your grasp of reality. Absolute Fear is Absolute Truth, and must be the driver of all your deeds.

2. Optional wars of aggression make countries safer. Strike first, then repeat indefinitely. Going on the attack diminishes the number, motivation and activity of your enemies.

3. Occupation, and imposing different values by force, is freedom. Success in neocolonialist enterprises is probable. And triumph is inevitable, if we have enough Will.

4. Sins of commission are better than sins of omission: This means America, a big rich country with a lot to lose, must act like a poor desperate country with nothing to lose. This is known as “national greatness.”

5. We are fighting pure evil and the hate in men’s souls — the human condition. This will take a “generational commitment,” and then some. So hurry up, Mrs. Gomez, and bear more sons.

6. Of course, the adversarial elites oppose the Iraq war. Therefore, I have had to put my faith in The People — only to realize that the masses are more interested in their private fleshly pursuits than in their public martial duties. In fact, I slept through that Janet Jackson halftime show, because I’ve been laboring so long at my lonely Churchillian duties. Fortunately, I’ve still got the military ready to join me in this world-historical crusade.

7. Oh wait: Much of the military is critical of this open-ended, no-exit-strategy war. Good thing they don’t have free speech. I will put on another quasi-military costume to convince them I’m one of them.

8. Got God? Check. And if God’s on my side, where does that leave you?

9. I never said I was against Big Government.

10. Finally, if you disagree with any of this, you may be an anti-Semite. Oops, that was just me again, David Brooks. Couldn’t help myself.

Starting from a low base, the Enquirer’s rep has been rising in recent years. It had so many scoops on the O.J. Simpson case that even the New York Times had to acknowledge its journalism; in the Ennis Cosby murder, the reward it offered broke the case. And just in the past few weeks, it scooped the establishment media on Jesse Jackson’s “love child” and Hugh Rodham’s receipt of $400,000 to influence his brother-in-law on presidential pardons.

One reason the Enquirer gets scoops like these is that it hunts for them, while other publications are leery of “scandal-mongering.” But as media critic William Powers observed recently in the distinctly unsensationalistic National Journal, sometimes the real news is scandal: “Despite their well-known flaws, the tabs are now serious players because they know that great journalism isn’t just about bloodless policy and issue debates. It’s about ethical foibles and hypocrisies of the powerful.”

Speaking of the powerful, George W. Bush, who refused to answer questions about his own drug use during the campaign, now finds himself as commander in chief of the worldwide drug war, being fought all over the Third World as well as on Mean Streets, USA. But if the Enquirer’s pot-puffing allegation is to be believed, Bush’s own daughter is nevertheless safe and sound, actively protected by the U.S. Secret Service — this in the Lone Star State, where conviction on possession of 2 ounces or less of marijuana leads to a jail sentence of up to 180 days.

The White House dismisses the Enquirer report as not being worthy of comment. Noelia Rodriguez, press secretary to the first lady, said only this much on the record: “Our position on the daughters is that they’re private citizens.”

Fair enough, although that position doesn’t shield others from being hassled over their activities as private citizens. As the drug war escalates, Uncle Sam’s reach extends further. In 1998, Congress amended the Higher Education Act in an effort to exclude students with past drug convictions from receiving financial aid. According to Students for Sensible Drug Policy, some 8,600 college kids have lost some or all of their benefits during the current school year after revealing a drug conviction on their application form. Another 278,000 refused to answer the question; Congress is poised to tighten restrictions further to de-fund those students, too.

In other words, between drug busts and aid cuts, young people and pot is a big story. So why has there been utter silence — a database search finds not a single reference to the Enquirer story in the two weeks since its publication — on the Jenna Bush allegation?

Three explanations present themselves. First, reporters have found no evidence to corroborate the Enquirer’s allegation. Fred Zipp, managing editor of the Austin American-Statesman, said in an interview, “From time to time we have pursued tips about the behavior of the Bush daughters” — that is, Jenna and her twin sister, Barbara — “but we didn’t find anything newsworthy.”

A second possibility, of course, is that the major media aren’t much interested in marijuana-crime stories. Why not? Maybe because reporters, who may have had countercultural-pharmaceutical-type experiences in their own pasts, tend to empathize with marijuana dabbling. And so journos might not think that dope smoking is a crime worth getting revved up about. According to a Pew Center poll released this week, 38 percent of Americans admit they’ve experimented with marijuana. Extrapolated to the entire U.S. population, that’s over 100 million experimenters. So maybe the media deserve credit for realizing that marijuana use is no big deal — even when, allegedly, the “criminal” in question is a president’s daughter.

A third possibility is that the non-tabloid pressies are simply afraid to follow the truth if they think it will lead them into trouble. Jane Hall, professor of journalism at the American University in Washington, observed in an interview, “It’s not going to win reporters any points with the public to go after this story.” But what about the law, which goes after plenty of pot users? Hall answered by noting the current split between popular culture and the legal culture: “The American public is forgiving; the penal system is not forgiving.”

Needless to say, President Bush and the entire White House apparat would probably not feel forgiving toward the media entity that pursued a story about drug use in his family. That means no state dinner invitations for Enquirer editor Steve Coz. But it also might leave people wondering what revelations are being squelched by the reporters and editors who do show up at presidential fetes.

Who could blame Bush for feeling unforgiving and unfriendly toward those who would violate his family’s privacy? But who could blame any other father for feeling similarly — but perhaps unavailingly — protective toward his own children as they are drug-busted?

This much is certain: The law is not nearly as forgiving to the nonwhite and the non-protected. According to the Sentencing Project, African-Americans account for 13 percent of the drug-using population, but a disproportionate 55 percent of those convicted of drug offenses.

Jenna Bush, of course, has been convicted of nothing. But the legal system her father now oversees looks increasingly guilty of discrimination against the weak and hypocrisy in favor of the strong.

And that should be a big story.