Posted on 01/25/2003 10:12:05 AM PST by Dog Gone
hey put out some pretty vicious stuff out of Paris every day," John F. Kennedy complains in a tape recording newly made available by the late president's library. "They either attack us for trying to dominate Europe or they attack us for withdrawing from Europe, or that we won't use our nuclear force or that we'll get them into a war and they're not consulted."
Kennedy's outburst came in 1963, in reaction to the nationalist policies of Charles de Gaulle. But most every president since World War II has shared the sentiment at times — usually about France, but often about Germany or Europe in general. They argued with Europeans over missiles, the Middle East, Vietnam, the United Nations. France's contrariness became almost a given in American foreign policy, as did Germany's wariness of the use of force, a legacy of its own history.
So there's been a familiar feel all through the fall and winter to the tussles between Washington and the biggest powers on the European mainland, France and Germany, over the Bush administration's campaign against Saddam Hussein.
But last week, the dispute burst through the traditional facade of diplomatic niceties and revealed sentiments far different, and potentially more fateful, than the internecine squabbles of the cold war.
If Washington attacks Iraq on its own, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, declared, it would be "a victory for the law of the strongest." France and Germany, retorted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, were history.
"If you look at the entire NATO Europe today," he said, "the center of gravity is shifting to the east, and there are a lot of new members."
There was something distinctly different here. However frustrating Kennedy may have found General de Gaulle or the West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, all of them knew they were bound by a common enemy, the Soviet Union. The North Atlantic alliance was a real military instrument that America led. Even if France pretended to be independent of NATO's military structure, no French minister would dream of publicly accusing the United States of misusing power, and no American cabinet member would dare suggest that the Atlantic alliance could exist without France or Germany.
Last week, the Europeans were seething, even if they purported not to see a crisis — yet.
We are pretty hardened to American criticism," said Guillaume Parmentier, head of the French Center on the United States, which studies French-American relations in Paris. "I'm not saying we enjoy it, but we take it pretty well in general."
"I'm not too concerned," said Karsten D. Voigt, the coordinator for German-American cooperation in the German Foreign Ministry. "For those younger than I, they should be very concerned. I've seen Kennedy and Adenauer, Jimmy Carter and Helmut Schmidt. We have seen those difficulties before."
Both officials said that they supported the fundamental goal of disarming a dangerous dictator, and that they were only insisting that it be done with international sanction, and after United Nations weapons inspectors had been given enough time. Yet they also acknowledged that with a military operation seeming ever more certain, and with opposition in their countries hardening, a qualitatively new confrontation was taking shape.
"If eventually the Americans intervene without any sort of international mandate, we will have a split on a trans-Atlantic basis, and within Europe," Mr. Parmentier said. "The Brits will follow, the Spaniards and Italians will not participate but will give a polite go-ahead, and that will make it quite difficult to continue to pretend that we have a united front with the Americans, but also within Europe."
The core of the dispute, Mr. Voigt said, is what has divided Europe and the United States on other issues, from global warming to an international court. The Europeans have put their faith in multilateral institutions, while Mr. Bush's Washington, especially since Sept. 11, 2001, believes in the extraordinary power of the United States as the primary instrument of security and freedom around the world. As the administration proclaimed in its National Security Strategy, the United States "possesses unprecedented — and unequaled — strength and influence in the world" that "must be used to promote a balance of power that favors freedom."
To one senior European diplomat in Washington, these conflicting perspectives threaten to make an American invasion of Iraq into a "defining moment," a trans-Atlantic rift with repercussions on crises from Korea to the Middle East.
"At stake is not Iraq, or whether we can deal with it, but the larger issue of how America leads, how much confidence, how much support it has," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to Jimmy Carter.
For the French, Germans and many other Europeans, the administration's single-minded determination to oust Saddam Hussein evokes perceptions of a power deaf to its allies and prepared to wreak havoc in the name of its own sense of mission, even though Europe supported the United States in the Balkans and Afghanistan.
From the start, opinion polls in France have shown an overwhelming opposition to American military action, often in tandem with a conviction that the administration is really after Iraq's oil.
Among conservatives in Washington, the French and Germans represent an antiquated world order, whose insistence that military action have multilateral support is merely an attempt to hobble the United States. America has the right and duty to war against terror and its supporters wherever the fight leads.
"We face a hate-filled, remorseless enemy that takes many forms, hides in many places, and doesn't distinguish between innocent civilians and military combatants," the first secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, declared at his confirmation hearings.
To the Bush administration, no real distinction exists between that war and the war on a source of weapons of mass destruction.
But even if legislators applauded Mr. Ridge without dissent, public opinion polls and some politicians reflected a growing disquiet with the way the United States is moving toward war, particularly without Security Council support.
A Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, led his party's swelling assault on the administration's "go it alone if that's what it takes" stance, accusing Mr. Bush of a "blustering unilateralism."
Leon Fuerth, who was the national security adviser to Vice President Al Gore, said: "Maybe the administration is betting that if we do this on our own, our friends will come in with is, if not with combat operations, then to clear up the aftermath. But that is putting a lot of faith in their ability to swallow not only their anger, but to absorb the political impact at home."
The responsibility, Mr. Voigt acknowledged, was not only an American one. "In hindsight, since 9/11, politically it is not always totally understood in Europe that the administration does not see itself as starting a war, but as being in a war," he said. "We are also learning to think globally in security terms. It's a different spectrum, but we're both dealing with a new world."
The French have hated our guts since the day we liberated Paris.
It's a wonder they haven't dug up the graves of Americans killed saving their rotten hides on the beaches of Normandy.
If Clinton or Gore were in the White House they wouldn't say a thing.
European socialists, in league with American socialists in the Democratic party and the leftist press are doing everything they can to prevent a Republican American President from suceeding in any endeavor.
They will fail.
To allow them to slow us down is to give them power.
The hate America crowd is really messing its pants.
The above statement....much like the rest of the article...is profoundly misleading. Allow me to give the examples.
"For the French, Germans and many other Europeans..."
No...actually far more European Nations support us. The minority voice in Europe opposes what we are ready to do.
"the administration's single-minded determination to oust Saddam Hussein evokes perceptions of a power deaf to its allies and prepared to wreak havoc in the name of its own sense of mission"
Nicely worded huh? Let's try America's [Administration attempts to highlight Conservatives] focus on removing a megalomaniacal Dictator cut from the same cloth as Europe's own Hitler, who has already attempted to assasinate one American President, Who has been feverishly working to build a Nuclear Weapon and who already has Chemical and Biological weapons. America simply wont be preached to by lightweight Socialist welfare states in Europe who themselves have no moral ground to stand on.
"even though Europe supported the United States in the Balkans and Afghanistan"
Now the writer speaks of Europe as a single entity though earlier it was "the French, Germans and many other Europeans". Nice try. Neither the French nor Germans supported what we were doing. They knew there was absolutely nothing they could do about it....period. And the financial losses they would incure were minimal. To say "Europe" supported us in going after the Taliban and Bin Laden is brutally hilarious.
But of course...there is no Liberal bias in the media.
~Grin~
5.56mm
Amen to that, brother.
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