NOT THEIR WAR:

Let Europe be Europe: You won’t be our friends? Fine, protect yourselves and at least be neutral. (Victor Davis Hanson, 6/18/04, National Review)

The ethicists of Europe don't want to see success in Iraq, since it might be interpreted as a moral refutation of their own opposition to Saddam's removal. So let us in turn stop begging old Europe, NATO, and the EU to participate in the rebuilding or policing of the country. To join or help, in the collective European mind, would be to suggest that an emerging democracy far away was worth our own sacrifice to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. Liberating Iraq, shutting down Baathist terror, and establishing consensual rule, after all, was a dangerous — and mostly Anglo-American — idea, antithetical to all the Europeans have become.

Understandably, they do not want to be lumped in with the "missionaries of democracy" who evoke the ire of terrorists or the disdain of oil-producing grandees. They do not wish to forgive the debts run up by Saddam Hussein for their overpriced junk. And they most certainly are not willing to do any favors for Texas-twanged George W. Bush, whom they hope will be gone in less than six months. All this is not their world, which operates on self-interest gussied up with the elevated rhetoric of the utopian EU — appealing to an Al Gore's Earth-in-the-Balance mindset rather than to serious folk who worry about genocide and mass murder.

So there are reasons our alliances cannot simply be glued back together again, and they transcend neo-con zeal and Bush as el Loco cowboy. Europeans, aside from a few tiny brave countries and courageous individuals, will no more participate in the "illegal" action in Iraq than they did in the "approved" and "legal" Afghanistan intervention, where about 7,000 NATO troops now help a postbellum liberated population of 26 million. Even if we sent Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Jesse Jackson as an obsequious trio, the Euros would not act in a resolute, muscular way.

To the small degree Mr. Bush supposedly encountered a more conciliatory attitude from Europeans, it was likely because wiser heads in Germany finally saw that their animus had nearly succeeded in generating an American consensus to end the free defense of Europe — not because of a new remorseful "multilateralism" by the president. A quarter of Americans now see France as an enemy — not an ally or even a neutral — and the number is growing. Any sane person who carefully examined America's relationship to Europe over the last 60 years would have advised the Germans and French not to throw away something so advantageous to their own national interests. But they did, and now we must move on. [...]

Most Frenchmen either refused to resolutely fight the Germans or passively collaborated. The idea of a broad resistance was mostly a postwar Gallic nationalist myth. Those who spearheaded a few attacks on German occupiers were more likely led by Communists than by allied sympathizers, and thus fought in hope more of an eventual Soviet victory over the Nazis than an American one.

Just out of curiosity, how are the Spanish doing in their war against al Qaeda? Presumably they sent the troops they pulled out of Iraq to Western Pakistan to hunt down the folk who plotted 3-11, right?

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 19, 2004 1:22 PM