Memo to Europe:
Grow up on Iraq
This summer of phony war looks even weirder when you compare
the European and American press. In London and Paris, Berlin
and Brussels, the papers are full of speculation about war with
Iraq. There are demands that parliament be recalled; there are
rumors of potential cabinet resignations; there are secret polls
showing the enormous unpopularity of George Bush among
Britons. In Germany, the Chancellor is even making opposition to
war a key plank of his re-election campaign. But in the imperial
capital, thousands of miles away, a strange calm prevails. The
Senate has just held hearings on a potential war against Saddam,
but the administration says it is not yet ready to give testimony.
Congress is in recess. The president has gone to Texas. Many
Americans are on vacation. Newspapers are covering the issue,
but it has yet to rise to an actual, impassioned, substantive debate.
And there's little mystery why. Despite the efforts of anti-war
newspapers such as the New York Times, polls consistently show
somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of Americans support war.
The president has rhetorically committed himself to such an
outcome. Privately no one close to the administration doubts it
will take place - probably this winter. Americans are not blithe
about this war: it will be their sons and daughters who die in it.
But neither are they prepared to ignore a threat to the West as
dangerous as any we have faced.
And American response to European panic and resistance? It's
perhaps best summed up by a slightly impatient sigh. "Europeans
Queasy About American Power" is not exactly a shocking
headline any more. It simply isn't news that the Guardian opposes
the use of arms to pre-empt the re-emergence of one of the most
evil and dangerous regimes in the world. It isn't news that the EU,
as represented by Chris Patten, prefers to subsidize Palestinian
terror rather than fret about the possible Iraqi use of biological
weapons. American eyes simply glaze over at this habitual pattern
of European denial and protest. If Europeans opposed even the
war in Afghanistan, what chance is there they will support war
against Iraq? Americans have seen it before. They'll see it again.
Meanwhile, they have work to do.
But, at a deeper and more worrying level, it's increasingly true that
many Americans simply don't care any more. They are used to
Europeans instinctually opposing any use of military force; and
they are used to reflexive (and often hypocritical) anti-
Americanism from the European center and left. But added to this
is a relatively new and unanswerable factor: why on earth, apart
from good manners, should Americans care about what Europe
thinks? Yes, diplomacy demands courtesy and "listening." But it's
not at all clear what else it requires. Militarily, Europe is a dud,
and well on its way to becoming a complete irrelevance. With the
sole exception of Britain, the Europeans have contributed a
minuscule amount of the money and manpower to defang (but not
yet defeat) al Qaeda. They couldn't even muster enough initiative
and coordination to prevent another genocide in their own
continent in the 1990s. They have cut their defense spending to
such an extent that, with the exception of Britain, they are
virtually useless as military allies. And these cuts in military
spending are continuing - even after September 11. If a person
who refuses to lock his door at night starts complaining about the
only cop on the beat, sane people should wonder what has
happened to his grip on reality. Does he actually want to be
robbed or murdered? Similarly, it is one thing for Europeans to
say that they are ceding all military responsibility to maintain
international order to the United States. It is quite another for
Europeans to then object when the United States takes the
Europeans at their word and acts to defend that world order.
And the need for such order has not been abolished in the last
decade. The world is still a terrifyingly dangerous place - perhaps,
with the advance of destructive technology, more dangerous than
at any time in the past. It was once impossible to conceive that
radical terrorists could acquire the capacity to destroy an entire
city like New York or Rome. But they are now on the verge of
that capacity, and last September demonstrated to the world that
they would show no hesitation in using it. An average, bewildered
American therefore feels like asking of nervous Europeans: just
what about September 11 do you not understand? These
murderous fanatics could not have been clearer about their intent
and capabilities. They want to kill you and destroy your
civilization. This must change the prudential equation when faced
with a menace like Saddam Hussein. When a tyrant like Saddam
is doing all he can to acquirre biological, cehmical and nuclear
weapons, when he has already invaded a neighboring state, when
he has used chemical weapons against his own people, when he is
subsidizing terror elsewhere in the Middle East, when he has
extensive ties to Islamist terrorist groups around the world, doesn't
the benefit of the doubt shift toward those who aim to disarm and
dethrone him? And doesn't the mass grave of 3,000 Americans in
the middle of New York City change the equation just a little?
This is the core of Americans' puzzlement about not just European
vacillation but passionate opposition to taking on Saddam. When
religious leaders actually argue that the United States is more
moraly troubling than a butcher who has gassed his own people
and waged wars of incalculable human cost, then you know some
moral bearings have been lost. You know that the forces of
appeasement and moral equivalence are as powerful today as they
were in the 1970s when faced with Soviet evil and the 1930s
when faced with Nazi evil. In this regard, it is useful to compare
the response of Russia and Britain, with the official EU and
widespread European hostility to the use of American force in the
world. Both Russia and Britain provided key aid in the
Afghanistan mission and both governments have been supportive
of American concerns over Iraq. Both countries are acting as if
they too have a responsibility to counter international terrorism
and to sever its umbilical link to rogue states like Iraq, Iran and
North Korea. Russia, Britain and America may disagree on some
matters - their interests won't always coincide. But they share a
common understanding of the threat we all face and have found a
practical response to it. This is the difference between cooperating
and mere whining. And it's a difference Washington appreciates.
In contrast, the Europe-wide hostility to American power and
ingratitude for the Afghanistan campaign are bewildering. It's
worth repeating an obvious fact: If it were not for America, al
Qaeda, with support from Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Hamas,
would still be ensconced in Afghanistan, planning new and more
deadly attacks against the West. If it weren't for America, it is a
virtual certainty that London and Paris would have by now
experienced similarly catastrophic events as September 11. If it
weren't for America, militarized fundamentalist Islam would, with
the help of millions of Islamist immigrants, be gaining even more
strength in Continental Europe. Yet European response to
America's world-saving Afghanistan mission has not been thanks,
appreciation or support. It has been increased criticism of the
United States for seeking to continue the job in Iraq and
elsewhere. At times, it even seems that Europeans believe that
America's self-defense is more of a problem for world order than
terrorist groups, aided by local tyrants like Saddam, coming close
to acquiring weapons of mass destruction. On this score, many
Americans don't just differ with many Europeans, they are
repulsed by their inverted logic and moral delinquency. And they
have a point. In a recent essay in National Review, a conservative
magazine, Victor Davis Hanson summed up a common American
view toward European complainers:
"Iraq? Stay put ” we don't necessarily need or desire your help.
The Middle East? Shame on you, not us, for financing the
terrorists on the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority and Israel?
You helped to fund a terrorist clique; we, a democracy ” go
figure. Racism? Arabs are safer in America than Jews are in
Europe. That 200,000 were butchered in Bosnia and Kosovo a few
hours from Rome and Berlin is a stain on you, the inactive, not us,
the interventionist. Capital punishment? Our government has
executed terrorists; yours have freed them. Do the moral
calculus."
Israel, of course, plays a central role in this divide. It is still
shocking to read, say, the BBC's accounts of what is happening in
Israel and the West Bank, compared with even the most pro-
Palestinian of major media in America. It is almost a given in the
European media that Israel is the problem, Israel the aggressor,
Israel the immoral protagonist in the conflict. To read the
Independent or the Daily Mirror is to see a world where Israel is
always guilty until proved innocent - in Jenin, for example, where
the Independent declared a war crime before any real evidence
had been presented. The fact that Israel is a democracy, while
there is not a single democracy in the entire Arab world, is
ignored. The fact that Israel exists in part because of Europe's
legacy of genocidal anti-Semitism is also conveniently forgotten.
The fact that Israel occupies the West Bank out of self-defense in
the 1967 war is also expunged from memory. The incidental
killing of civilians in Israel's acts of military self-defense are
routinely regarded as morally equivalent to the deliberate
targeting of civilians by Palestinian terrorists. And the routine,
vile, Nazi-like hatred of Jews, an anti-Semitism that is now a key
part of the governing ideology of the Arab states, is simply
ignored, or down-played or denied.
When Americans see these double-standards, when they witness
reflexive hostility to Israel in the European media, they naturally
wonder if anti-Semitism, Europe's indigenous form of hate, isn't
somehow behind it. And when Europeans respond with outrage
toward this inference, it only compounds the problem. We're not
anti-Semitic, we're anti-Israel, they claim. But while the slightest
infraction of civilized norms by the Israelis is trumpeted from the
mountaintops, the routine torture, despotism, intolerance and
corruption that is the norm among Israel's neighbors barely gains a
column inch or two. And the mis-steps and human rights
violations of other countries - China in Tibet, Russia in Chechnya,
Sri Lanka against the Tamils, and most famously, Serbia against
Bosnian Muslims - never quite make the sniff-test of outrage and
action. (Remember: it was America who finally rescued the
Muslims of the Balkans, while Europe fiddled and diddled.) In
this context, it is simply natural to ask of Europeans: isn't it a little
suspicious, given Europe's history, that it's Israel that always gets
your critical attention?
Talk to many Europeans and their self-defense gets even worse.
They will soon tell you that America's support for the only
democracy in the Middle East is a function of the "all-powerful
Jewish lobby" in Washington. It doesn't occur to them that
references to such a lobby's subterranean influence are themselves
facets of anti-Semitism so deep it barely registers. When the
Guardian can run a column days after September 11 with the
headline, "Who Dare Blame Israel?" you can see how deep the
anti-Semitic rot has buried itself into the liberal mind. When the
French have a best-seller on how the plane that crashed into the
Pentagon was part of a CIA-Jewish plot, you can see why
Americans are circumspect. When synagogues are burned, when
Jewish cemeteries are desecrated and an anti-Semitic fascist
comes in second in the first round of French voting, is it a shock
that Americans see Europe as a place that hasn't really changed
that much in fifty years in some respects?
There are, of course, deeper structural reasons for Europe's
aversion to American power. By unilaterally disarming itself,
Europe is making a statement about how the world should be
governed: by mediation, diplomacy, international agreements,
polled sovereignty. The American analyst Robert Kagan famously
expanded on this theme in a much-discussed recent essay. The
experience of the EU - the way in which ancient enemies like
France and Germany now cooperate in a conflict-free, post-
nationalist arena - is regarded as morally and strategically superior
to America's still-tenacious defense of sovereignty and millitary
force. What this analysis misses, of course, is a little history. The
only reason the E.U. can exist at all is because American military
force defeated Nazi Germany. The only reason why all of
Germany is now included in the E.U. is because American
military force defeated the Soviet Union. Europhiles mistake the
fruits of realpolitik with its abolition. And they don't realize that
the best and only guarantor of European peace and integration -
now threatened from within and without by Islamist terror - is
American force again. Instead of cavilling at such intervention,
these Europeans should be praying for it - in order to save their
own political achievement.
This is not to dismiss the serious questions to be asked about any
Iraq war. Should it be a massive land invasion with over 200,000
troops - or a smaller force of, say, 50,000 supplemented by special
forces? How do we prevent Saddam using chemical or biological
weapons if attacked? How could this destabilize the region in
worrying ways - as opposed to the right ways? Is Turkey on
board? How do we cope with a post-Saddam Iraq? These are
onerous matters and they deserve a thorough airing. But their
premise is responsibility for world order. Europeans may believe
that they have abolished realpolitik in their internal affairs, that
national interest is a thing of the past, that military power is an
anachronism. And within the confines of a few European
countries, they may be right. But in the wider world - especially in
the combustible Middle East - history hasn't ended and a new
threat to world peace is rising, with the most dangerous weapons
in world history close to its grasp. If Europeans believe that it can
be palliated by subsidy or diplomacy or appeasement or surrender,
then they are simply mistaking their own elysian state of affairs
for the Hobbesian world outside their borders. They are
misreading their own times - as profoundly as they did in the
1930s.
America, in contrast, has no option but to tackle this threat - or
face its own destruction at the hands of it. The longer America
takes to tackle it, the greater the costs will be. The threat is
primarily to America, as the world hegemon, but Europe is not
immune either. The question for European leaders is therefore not
whether they want to back America or not. The question is
whether they want to be adult players in a new and dangerous
world. Grow up and join in - or pipe down and let us do it. That's
the message America is now sending to Europe. And it's a
message long, long overdue.
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