EUROPE'S PRESIDENT:

Let's rock the boat: Europeans should be cautious recruits to a President Kerry's war on terrorism (Timothy Garton Ash, August 5, 2004, The Guardian)

John Kerry started his acceptance speech at last week's Democratic convention by giving a military salute and saying, "I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty." He was introduced, very movingly, by a veteran who lost both legs and one arm fighting in Vietnam. On stage were other Vietnam veterans who served with Kerry on one of the so-called swift boats going up the Mekong river. That swift boat provided the metaphor for Kerry's whole speech. Evoking "our band of brothers" he said: "We may be a little older, we may be a little greyer, but we still know how to fight for our country." Pointing to a giant stars and stripes flag, he recalled how "Old Glory" used to fly "from the gun turret right behind my head and it was shot through and through and tattered, but it never ceased to wave in the wind." And he came back to the gunboat at the end, claiming that the men who served on it cared nothing for their differences of race and background. "That is the kind of America that I will lead as president: an America where we are all in the same boat."

This unabashed, emotional, militant patriotism is something unimaginable in contemporary Europe. Watching many hours of it, glued to the television screen here in California, I felt conflicting emotions: some envy of a nation that still has the confidence and optimism to evoke those simple, primary colours, "freedom and faith and family" as Bill Clinton put it, in a brilliant speech; some alarm at the way in which my own emotions could be manipulated, for this Democratic convention was directed like a Hollywood movie. (Steven Spielberg helped with the documentary film introducing Kerry.) Then a fit of old European irony at the patriotic kitsch. John Kerry served bravely in Vietnam, but only for four and a half months. We shall be hearing about his service for a lot longer.

I was reminded of an old Czech joke about the much mythologised Slovak national rising against the Nazis: "Which lasted longer, the Slovak rising or the film about the Slovak rising?" And yet, through it all, I had an overwhelming sense that here, amid these enthusiastic men and women of every colour and background, was the other, better America, which has got lost from European view amid the Cheneys, Rumsfelds and Bushes. [...]

A Kerry administration would start from the position that this war can only be won by working with America's friends and allies around the world. It will therefore ask us to step straight up to the plate. Kerry's carefully unspecific recipe for the future of Iraq is that bringing more allies on board should help to reduce the American troop presence there.

If Europe has any wisdom at all, we should start thinking now about how we answer this Democratic challenge. Our answer should be, "Yes, so long as _ " Yes, so long as you rededicate yourself to a peace process between Israel and Palestine. So long as you recognise that Iraq has to be embedded into a much larger project of reform and development in the broader Middle East, which America and Europe can only achieve together. So long as you deliver on your promises to develop alternative energy technologies, address your own excessive carbon dioxide emissions, come back to the international treaties and institutions that the Bush administration abrogated and scorned.

There's a selling point for the Democrats: John Kerry, a man the Europeans are convinced will be their bitch.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 7, 2004 11:23 PM