The treasure of liberty…and of friends

This past Tuesday the Wall Street Journal ran a column by Spain’s foreign minister Ana Palacio. This morning the Journal has made the column available on its OpinionJournal Web site. It is course no longer news that Spain is supporting us in the war, but the column is striking for its powerful dissent from the Franco/Prussian axis: “Allies, not counterweights.”
Palacio concludes her column with an invocation of Don Quixote: “As our Cervantes had Don Quixote say, liberty is ‘one of the most precious gifts heaven has bestowed upon Man. No treasures the earth contains or the sea conceals can be compared to it. For liberty one can rightfully risk one’s life.’”
Palacio’s column illustrates a point made by George Melloan in his Journal column on the opposite page the same day: “One thing about a war, it exposes who are friends and who are enemies, not to mention the disgusting behavior of some enemies. One hopes that the U.S. is keeping a good scorecard as it pursues its efforts to wipe out the regime of one of the world’s most vicious villains.”