NO, PEACE WAS THE ANSWER:

When War Was The Answer (George Will, 9/02/07, Real Clear Politics)

Today, in an America understandably weary of a war of choice that has been defined by execrable choices, a frequently seen bumper sticker proclaims: "War is not the answer." But here, especially, it is well to remember that whether war is the answer depends on the question.

War was the answer to what ailed Europe in 1944. "In 1942," writes Timothy Garton Ash of Oxford and Stanford's Hoover Institution, "there were only four perilously free countries in Europe: Britain, Switzerland, Sweden and Ireland." Twenty years -- a historical blink -- later, almost all of Western Europe was free. Twenty years after that, Spain, Portugal and Greece had joined the liberal democracies. Today, for the first time in 2,500 years, most Europeans live under such governments.

Ash argues that Europe cannot define itself negatively -- as not America or not Islam. "Europe's only defining 'other' is its own previous self" -- its self-destructive, sometimes barbaric past. "This is," Ash says, "still a very recent past."

In 1951, just seven years after Severloh and some other Germans surrendered on June 7 to Americans at the village of St. Laurent, Europe began building the institutions that it hoped would keep such young men out of machine gun emplacements. It created the European Coal and Steel Community, precursor of the Common Market (1958), which led to the single market in 1993 and the common currency in 2002.

The implicit hope was that commerce could tame Europe's turbulent nations.

As David Cohen is fond of pointing out, the genius of America's post-war policy towards Europe -- getting nations to surrender sovereignty to the EU, using Marshall aid to prop up their socialistic welfare systems, keeping them wholly dependent on US military might, etc. -- was that it destroyed Europe and rendered it thoroughly harmless.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 2, 2007 8:23 AM