Andrew Sullivan: 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.

Originally published in The Sunday Times of London, August 11, 2002

It is a mistake to conclude from sources like BBC, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, etc. that Europeans are opposed to what we must do. In fact, the European media follows the NY Times/Washington Post line on international matters involving the US as slavishly as newspapers in Des Moines or Kansas City do. I have talked to intelligent professional Europeans who are in complete agreement with us. One of them told me that the US was magnificent: no superpower in the history of the world has ever exercised its power with such responsibility and magnanimity. So what we are talking about is the same problem there as here: "liberal" elitists who turn their noses up at the idea of US success, a worse outcome for them, given their worldview, than further terrorism.

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.

I think the Euros have taken us for granted so long they just assume they can take sides against us out of habit and we will always be there when they need us. What I see is real hostility among the American people towards the Euros where before they were simply annoying. A lot of Euros are saying they won't let us use bases in their country in the fight against Iraq. We should tell them if they don't we leave NATO and they are on their own.

An excellent, and sadly truthful piece. I would like to add something of interest here, if I might: I have deployed to Europe on three separate occaisions, and continue to train amongst European(and Australian) military personnel to this day. I can truthfully say that the grunt-level Soldiers and Sailors of the Continent would like nothing better than to be unleashed upon the terrs to fight with us. THEY "get it", and very well. They were just as shocked and enraged by the atrocities of 9-11 as we, and most were solidly dissapointed in their governments' fecklessness.

Heap scorn and derision to the heights of the Twin Towers themselves on the quisling Euro Left and the worthless socialist governments it has spawned, but remember that their best men (be they French Foriegn Legion, Bundeswehr, Italian Army/Navy, or Her Majesty's Troops) are with us in spirit, at least until their bosses strap on a set.

Excellent article by Sullivan.

If I may contribute one minor point re Germany:

Chancellor Schroeder (separated from Clinton at birth) has indeed fired up his craven pandering to overdrive, hoping to score points with his electorate at U.S. expense.

"Germany," he says, "will not join any U.S. action against Iraq because there is no UN security council mandate."

(I'm sure Rumsfeld is crestfallen, he had so been hoping the Panzergrenadiere would carry the burden of the war.)

Ironically, however, the German association of Bundeswehr officers has slapped Schroeder in the face with a polite reminder that the security council has not even been asked yet for a resolution. By not waiting for such a vote, the association said, Schroeder is shoowing disrespect for the United Nations and the principle of international law that he supposedly holds dear.

Heheh. Schroeder and his minions are beside themselves with rage (Who's in charge here! etc.), but they can't help looking more and more pathetic every day.

To Americans, democracy means majority rule,

What constituion are you reading? Last time I looked we were a representative republic. A system of government designed by our founders to prevent a tyranny of the majority as well as a minority. Staggered Senatorial and congressional elections and a president elected not by popular majority but by an electoral college.

I think you should dig up a copy of the "Federalist Papers" and read it.

We are a Republic NOT a democracy.

The issue is majority rule, something the founders of our republic did everything in their power to prevent as they saw it as much of a threat as a tyranny by a majority. By moderating the actual distribution of power they hoped to moderate the passions of the people so they could be more reflective of things such as legislation and not lead to acts of rashness.

Sullivan is a bit uncharitable when it comes to Europe. America has the power and self confidence to be of a more generous spirit, animated by a moral vision, than does Europe. Moreover, America has gone farther than most in exorcising the poison of anti-semitism, because so many of us have Jews as friends with whom we work, live near, and like, and know well. Europe does not have that experience alas these days in large part due to Hitler. It is not so much that Europe these days is evil, as that America is simply an exceptional place.

Sullivan oddly focuses on terrorism when it comes to Iraq, rather than nukes (granted I scaned the article and may have missed it). It is the latter on which the case rest to take Saddam out. And on that Tony Blair is quite splendid. That is what he focuses on (I just heard him this last Sunday on C-SPAN), and he and Britain will be with us not matter how much heat in generates for Blair internally. The guy has guts. I am a big fan of Blair, and would have voted for him in the last election, and probably the next, if I were eligible, and of course I'm not. He is a very impressive guy.

SKRUEM, been there already. Fatc is that the world would have been better off without a Europe in the twentieth century. They were the source of two world wars, all the isms (nazism, fascism,. socialism, communism) that prevail today originated there. Nobody can outdo the Euros for Genocide and mass murder. They have no defence and they can't deny the truth. they are unworthy to be residents of this planet. We would all be better off without them.

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