Wow. He did a good job as usual. Thanks for the post and ping, folks!Kofi Annan, having endured eight years of meaningless promises from Bill Clinton at these international gabfests, went so far as to express his impatience at the way these rip-roaring schemes by the global elite wind up getting stalled because of the votes of obscure Senators from Missouri and North Dakota. M. Chrétien is so exquisitely imperial a Prime Minister he thought nothing of tying explicitly the money earmarked for Africa to his own continuation in office, but, alas for the convenience of Secretary-General Annan, America is not a one-man state.
That's where the EU, in their haste to line up at the Eurinals and spray their contempt over Bush, are missing the point. Who is this arrogant cowboy, they sneer, to tell the Palestinians whom they can vote for. Actually, that's not what Bush said. The guys who tell people who they can vote for are the Europeans. Only a couple weeks back, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder told the French to vote for Chirac. In February, the Belgian Foreign Minister threatened sanctions against Italy if they voted for Umberto Bossi's Northern League. When Austria proved less pliable and admitted duly elected members of Joerg Haider's Freedom Party to the coalition government, the EU did, indeed, impose sanctions.
But to suggest to Palestinians that things might go better if they elected a non-terrorist leadership is apparently unacceptable. Arafat has far more blood on his hand than Bossi, Haider, Jean-Marie Le Pen and Joerg Haider put together and multiplied a thousandfold, but he's the West's guy: they can talk to him, strongman to strongman, Jacques to Yasser. Suddenly Bush comes along and says not that he wants a non-Yasser President but that he'd like a new constitution, separation of powers, an autonomous legislature, independent municipal institutions. Where does that sound like? Britain, where Tony Blair can simply replace one house of the legislature with another more to his liking? Canada, where municipalities are abolished by order of the Ontario and Quebec governments? No, it sounds like he wants a U.S. Constitution for Palestine, where President Yasser Clinton and Vice-President Mohammed al-Gore get hamstrung by Senator Ahmed Helms and Senator Walid Thurmond, and, either way, it makes no difference to the residents of high-tax Ramallah or no-tax Jenin. Is Bush just winding up the Kofi set? Hard to say. But you can understand why the EU recoils from such a vision: If separation of powers were to catch on in Palestine, who's to say it mightn't spread to the Continent?
There's a famous Fleet Street headline often cited as an example of British isolationism: "Fog In Channel, Continent Cut Off." But the odd man out isn't necessarily the guy in the wrong. On matters such as the role of the state, concentration of power, and the usefulness of international institutions, I'll bet on the Americans: There's a fog in the Atlantic, but it's Europe that's cut off.
Saber, since I have temporarily (hopefully) lost my ping lists and other FR stuff
because of dying hard disk, could you ping this with your list for me?