A MATTER OF DATES?:

(via Mike Daley):
US thinks Europeans are cockroaches (Adam Nicolson, 04/11/2003, Daily Telegraph)

In Sir Peter Stothard's recent book on the inside workings of the Blair Government during the build-up to the Iraq war, there is one moment of extraordinary candour.

In September 2002, Stothard writes, Blair's "analysis of the relations between Washington, London and Baghdad" could be summarised in "six essential points to which he and his aides would regularly return". Five of them are obvious and well known: Saddam was a threat; Britain and America were his enemies; the post-9/11 United States was hungry for war; America would go to war whatever anyone else did; and all Europeans would require the involvement of the UN.

That's straightforward enough. But the sixth point, "scribbled on the back on an envelope", in Stothard's phrase - whether by Blair himself is not clear - is the eye-opener: "It would be more damaging to long-term world peace and security if the Americans alone defeated Saddam Hussein than if they had international support to do so." You can read that blandly, as another statement of the obvious, but at least its subtext is pretty well what Dennis Boyles claims all Europeans are thinking: the cockroach view that the new American unilateral imperialism is bad for the world. [...]

At the weekend, the New York Times carried some fascinating remarks by Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister. Bildt says it comes down to a question of dates. Until recently, America and Europe shared 1945 as their definitive year, when one tyrannical enemy was defeated and another emerged, a succession of common threats which bound them into one alliance and one
world view. But that date has now been eclipsed: in Europe by 1989, the crumbling of the great frontier that for more than four decades separated one half of Europe from the other; and in America by 2001, the cataclysmic moment when America came under murderous threat for the first time since Pearl Harbor. Those different dates are now driving us apart. "While we talk of peace, they talk of security," Mr Bildt says on behalf of Europe. "While we talk of sharing sovereignty, they talk about exercising sovereign power. When we talk about a region, they talk about the world." The real question is whether it is a rift that can be healed.

To paraphrase Norm Peterson: The Europeans, can't live with 'em......pass the beer nuts.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 5, 2003 11:57 PM