Madrid 2004 = Munich 1938?

For neo-conservative and other right-wing hawks, Madrid has suddenly become Munich in 1938 and Spain's Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

In an extraordinarily unanimous campaign, newspaper columnists and television commentators are flooding the media with cries of ''appeasement," the dreaded epithet with which Chamberlain was permanently tagged after his meeting in Munich with Adolf Hitler, which permitted the Nazis to slice off a major chunk of Czechoslovakia.

In the hawks' view, the electoral defeat of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's People's Party in the wake of last Thursday's bombings, followed by Zapatero's pledge to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq by Jul. 1, marks a collapse of will by a key U.S. ally in President George W. Bush's ''war on terrorism'' that will only encourage Islamist extremists.

''Neville Chamberlain, en Espanol'' was the title of the featured column by Ramon Perez-Maura of Madrid's 'ABC' newspaper on the neo-conservative editorial page of Wednesday's 'Wall Street Journal', while the New York Times' David Brooks asked in his bi-weekly column Tuesday, ''What is the Spanish word for appeasement?''

Tony Blankley, editorial page editor for 'The Washington Times', was quick to put a name to what he called Zapatero's ''policy of appeasement'' -- ''The Spanish Disease'' -- while the increasingly neo-conservative editorial writers at the 'Washington Post' worried that the Socialist leader's ''rash'' response to the bombings will mark the beginning of a domino effect throughout Europe.

''The danger is that Europe's reaction to a war that has now reached its soil," the Post said, ''will be retreat and appeasement rather than strengthened resolve," a point echoed by Edward Luttwak, a long-time fixture of the national-security commentariat who wrote in the 'New York Times', ''the Zapateros of Europe ... seem bent on validating the crudest caricatures of 'old European' cowardly decadence."

The image was starkly drawn as well by Robert Kagan, the neo-conservative who coined the phrase ''Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus."

Warning that the bombings and the election results in Spain ''have brought the United States and Europe to the edge of the abyss," the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose alumni include the most powerful hawks in the Bush administration, poured scorn on European Commission President Romano Prodi's comment after the attacks that, ''It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists."

''Are Europeans prepared to grant all of al-Qaeda's conditions in exchange for a promise of security?'' asked Kagan. ''Thoughts of Munich and 1938 come to mind."

While some of these commentators conceded that Aznar might himself bear some responsibility for the sudden turn of events -- notably by trying to blame the Basque group ETA even while evidence that the perpetrators were radical Islamists was becoming overwhelming -- the basic thrust of all their comments was that, by supporting Zapatero, the Spanish electorate had lost its will to confront the larger terrorist threat, just as Chamberlain had done in handing over the Sudetenland.

This interpretation of the Spanish electorate's choice and of Zapatero himself obviously ignored a number of factors, among them the fact that the Socialist leader said explicitly from the moment of his victory that he was committed to the fight against terrorism.

''My most immediate priority is to fight all forms of terrorism," he said. ''And my first initiative, tomorrow, will be to seek a union of political forces to join us together in fighting it."

That right-wing commentators here generally ignored that vow, or refused to take it seriously, helps illustrate their view -- which they have been hawking since Sep. 11 with great success among the U.S. public -- that Iraq is part of the larger war on terrorism, as opposed to there being two different conflicts.