Ignore Europe, and there’s hope for Iraq

The Union Leader (NH) ^ | 03 November 2003 | James K Glassman

[Lorianne]

AT THE END of one of Europe’s many holiday weekends, the irony is so thick here you can layer it on with a trowel.

Europeans, with a few laudable exceptions, detest what the American cowboys have done in Afghanistan and Iraq and are happy to tell you so.

The irony, of course, is that 60 years ago, American troops liberated Paris, marched on to Berlin and saved Britain and the rest of Western Europe. Our interest in defeating the Nazis was the same as our interest in defeating the Taliban and Saddam Hussein: in the short term, to free oppressed people; in the medium term, to build democracy; in the long term, to make America safer.

Few in Europe noticed that, last week, Afghanistan completed a free election, just three years after America triggered the destruction of the Taliban regime, which leftist and radical feminists, especially, had been decrying for a decade. Eight million Afghan citizens, two-fifths of them women, cast ballots, electing a pro-American democrat.

Again, with no fanfare, the nation with the largest Muslim population in the world held a free and fair election on Oct. 20 — the first time Indonesia chose its leader by direct vote, rather than by parliament.

In Iraq, an election is scheduled for January. If it comes off successfully, that country’s transformation will be even faster than Afghanistan’s.

Yes, the aftermath of the war that overthrew Saddam has been bloody and chaotic. But consider World War II.

On Jan. 7, 1946, Life magazine, ran an article by the popular novelist John Dos Passos on the condition of Europe 18 months after the liberation of Paris. By comparison, 18 months have also passed since the liberation of Baghdad.

The headline moaned, “Americans Are Losing Victory in Europe: Destitute Nations Feel That U.S. Has Failed Them.”

“Never has American prestige in Europe been lower,” wrote Dos Passos. “A tour of the beaten-up cities of Europe . . . is a mighty sobering experience for anyone. Europeans, friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American:”

Dos Passos reminds readers of “the tragic results of the ineptitude” of the aftermath of World War I. But that was “Utopia compared to the present tangle of snarling misery.” Europe after World War II was hell, and the Europeans hated their liberators almost as much as their oppressors.

President Bush, in his acceptance speech on Sept. 2, quoted a New York Times reporter in 1946: “Germany is a land in an acute stage of economic, political and moral crisis. European capitals are frightened. In every military headquarters, one meets alarmed officials doing their utmost to deal with the consequences of the occupation policy that they admit has failed.”

The American President, Harry Truman, persevered, “knowing,” in Bush’s words, “that a new democracy at the center of Europe would lead to stability and peace.”

What’s so surprising is not that many Americans have forgotten the example of World War II but that many more Europeans — steeped, as they are quick to tell you, in history — have.

Why? Mainly because the heart of Europe, for all its cultural virtues, has become politically decadent. The French and Germans, especially, are unable to stand on any principle in world affairs, except a kind of sentimental Marxism, myopic pacifism and goofy environmentalism.

If the United States is the only military power today, it is in large part because the Europeans — who have greater economic output and a greater population — want us to be. They also believe, however, that we should serve as their mercenaries, using our troops and our resources only where Europe wants them used. Without military power, Europeans believe they can bully us, through moral superiority.

For example, a few days before the U.S. election, the British medical journal, (The Lancet), ran a dubious study, claiming a sensational number of civilian deaths in Iraq. The editor, explaining why he rushed the piece into print, derisively called the actions of America and its allies in Iraq “democratic imperialism.”

During and after World War II, our “democratic imperialism” made Western Europe free — and, eventually, Eastern Europe as well.

Within a decade or two, we will likely see tyrants falling and democracy budding in Syria, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia as well — but not if we listen to Europe.

My worry is just that: an America becoming more like Europe, “obsessed,” as Dos Passos wrote in 1946, “with a craven fear of our own virtues.”

James K. Glassman is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and host of TechCentralStation.com