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Posted on 10/03/2002 6:42:35 AM PDT by Pokey78
Europe spends zip on defence and sneers at America’s ‘warmongering’. It’s not a pretty sight, says Mark Steyn
New Hampshire
Nelson Mandela says it’s the US and not Saddam Hussein who’s ‘the threat to world peace’. Canada’s transport minister, in his contribution to 11 September observances, regretted that the Soviet Union was no longer around to act as a check on American ‘bullying’. Sweden’s Goran Persson wants to build up the EU because it’s ‘one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to US world domination’. Sweden was famously relaxed about Nazi world domination and Soviet world domination, but sometimes there are threats so monstrous that even in Stockholm you have to get off the fence. In Germany Gerhard Schroeder is Chancellor today because his party successfully articulated the great menace that George W. Bush poses to the planet. Feel free to insert standard ‘arrogant cowboy’ imagery and other examples of rampant Texaphobia.
Let’s suppose for a moment that these fellows are right. The question then arises: So what are you going to do about it? Well, Mr Mandela’s country has been busy selling aluminium tubes for uranium enrichment centrifuges to Saddam. The first secretary of the South African embassy in Jordan is serving as the local sales rep to Iraqi procurement agents. Thanks to these sterling efforts, they’re bringing significantly closer the day when the entire Middle East, much of Africa and even Europe will be under the Saddamite nuclear umbrella and thus safe from Bush’s aggression.
Way to go, Nelson! But what are the rest of you guys doing? I’m a little out of the loop with the great thinkers of the world stage, so I’ve foolishly spent the last year working on the erroneous assumption that Saddam’s the big threat. I’ve wasted my time positing likely scenarios for a post-butcher Baghdad and the possible consequences for Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. I don’t pretend to have all the answers — well, okay, I do, but only when I’m being interviewed on TV shows — but I find it a bit odd that the anti-American crowd, once you strip away the moral preening, don’t seem to have any answers.
Worse, in confronting the Bush terror, they’ve developed the curious habit of mistaking the Great Satan’s strengths for weaknesses. A couple of weeks back, I wrote about ‘the innovations of the Afghan campaign, when men in traditional Uzbek garb sat on horses and used laser technology to guide USAF bombers to their targets’. There followed the usual flurry of huffy emails insisting this proved absolutely nothing as the cowardly Yanks hadn’t had the ‘guts’ to send in ground troops.
I’ve heard this for a year now and I don’t get it. So war’s like cricket? There’s only one correct way to play? The idea that it doesn’t count unless it’s the Somme is most peculiar. Until last October, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that the way to fight a war is to use computers in Florida to drop horse-feed to anti-Taleban warlords but, if it serves your purpose, why not? Whether or not America has ‘no stomach for body bags’, in Afghanistan there was no need for them.
And, if you think about it, that’s what really ought to worry the anti-Yanks. The Americans had very limited aims in Afghanistan: they wanted to eliminate the country’s function as a base of operations for al-Qa’eda and kill as many evildoers as possible. This they did in little over a month, and very painlessly.
The anti-war types of the 1930s were wrong but, in fairness to them, their view was formed by the bloody toll of the Great War, the slaughter of a generation — their brothers, cousins, friends. The anti-war crowd today face precisely the opposite problem: that there’ll be no wholesale slaughter, that war for the United States now comes with no human cost. It can do anything it likes and lose nothing more than a couple billion dollars’ worth of ordnance. Unlike the Great War, there’ll be no lions led by donkeys piled high on the battlefield because there’ll be no battlefield — at least not for the Americans, dispatching their unmanned ‘drones’ to drop bombs from thousands of miles away. Even during Vietnam, the traditional line — vengeful old men sacrificing their nation’s best and brightest youth — still held. Back in March, the ferociously anti-war cartoonist Ted Rall did a nasty little strip called ‘Postmodern War Heroes’ featuring a bunch of veterans a few years in the future swapping war stories from the Afghan campaign and saluting their (literally) fallen comrades. Remember Ben whose ‘helicopter went down on the way to Afghanistan’? And Brenda, who fell out of hers? As Rall sees it, American servicemen no longer die in combat, just in accidents en route to carpet-bomb.
There’s something a little bewildering about an anti-war movement suddenly pining for the noble sacrifice of the poor bloody infantryman up to his neck in muck and bullets. But, if you honestly believe the Pentagon are long-range, high-tech, sissy-boy warmongers, let me say again: what are you going to do about it? The fact that the US is responsible for 40 per cent of the planet’s military spending pales in comparison to the really critical statistic: it’s responsible for almost 80 per cent of military research-and-development spending. The gap between America and its Nato ‘allies’ widens every day. Even when ground troops are involved, they won’t take up as much ground as they used to: as General James Jones of the US Marines puts it, ‘The rifle company of the 21st century will be doing what the rifle battalion of the 20th century used to do’ — that’s about an 85 per cent lay-off. You think those reconnaissance drones high in the sky were mighty fancy? They’ve now got a five-pound computerised drone you can fit in your backpack. In Afghanistan, a handful of prototype robots assisted in the cave-by-cave search for al-Qa’eda nutters. We can only guess at the new toys the Great Satan will have in five years’ time, but, whatever they are, I’ll bet my in-tray is still getting sneering missives: ‘So now the bloody Yank poofters are using flying nuclear cheeseburgers launched from the Diego Garcia Burger King. Not exactly the Bengal Lancers, is it?’
If Europeans don’t like this scenario, there’s only one way to do anything about it: get yourself back in the game. At the recent Nato meeting, Don Rumsfeld invited his colleagues to demonstrate their seriousness by setting up a Nato Rapid Reaction Force. He meant a real, actual Rapid Reaction Force, not a fictitious one like the EU’s. You’ll recall Louis Michel, the Belgian foreign minister, insisting late last year that the European Rapid Reaction Force ‘must declare itself operational without such a declaration being based on any true capability’. As the Washington Post remarked, ‘Apparently in Europe this works.’ Asked to set up an actual operational Rapid Reaction Force, most Nato members bristled: the cost would divert valuable resources from social programmes and might mean they’d have to cut back on welfare payments to Islamic terrorists.
So instead the plan is to diminish US hegemony by spending zippo on defence and putting all your eggs in the UN basket. Structurally, the UN is a creature of the Cold War. It formalised the stalemate of East and West: it was designed to prevent rather than enable action; it tended towards inertia, which was no bad thing given the potentially catastrophic consequences of the alternative. But we no longer have a bipolar world, and so the vetoes only work one way — to restrain the sole surviving superpower. England’s clergy have redefined the Christian concept of a just war to mean only one blessed by the Security Council, which is to say the governments of France, Russia and China: it will be left to two atheists and a lapsed Catholic to determine whether this is a war Christians can support. Even more perplexing, The Spectator feels the same way: our editorial last week declared that ‘only UN authorisation’ could provide a justification for war.
Just as a matter of interest, how many countries does George W. Bush have to have on board before America ceases to be acting ‘unilaterally’? So far, there’s Australia, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Qatar, Turkey.... Romania has offered the use of its airspace to attack Iraq. The Americo-Romanian Coalition Against Iraq has more members than most multilateral organisations. But no matter how multilateral it gets, it doesn’t count unless it’s sanctioned by the UN. If France feels the need to invade the Ivory Coast, that can be done unilaterally. But, when it’s America, you gotta get a warrant from the global magistrate.
The anti-Yanks’ fetishisation of the UN is consistent with their general retro approach to the geopolitical scene: the more obsolescent the concept, the more eagerly they embrace it. Indeed, just to complete their embrace of the metaphorical Austin Powers Nehru jacket, the Left has finally signed on to the concept of ‘deterrence’. In the Cold War, they wanted no truck with this repulsive theory: why, the notion that ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ and a ‘balance of terror’ would protect us was morally contemptible and consigned our children to live under the perpetual shadow of Armageddon. But with Saddam it’ll work just swell. He’s a ‘rational actor’: even if he gets nukes — even if he has them now — he’s not crazy enough to use them. And, if he does, well, hell, it’s hasta la vista, Baghdad.
I can’t see it working myself. To pursue the analogy, deterrence means allowing Saddam to turn the bulk of the Middle East into his version of Eastern Europe, a collection of neutered and subverted client states, beginning with Jordan. Millions of people beyond Iraq’s borders will be informally conscripted into Saddam’s prison and bequeathed to his even nuttier son. There will no be peaceful negotiated resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian question.
If the object is to contain Saddam, deterrence will flop. If the object is to weaken America it just might work. We forget how fragile the concept is. It’s said the Soviets didn’t take it seriously until the Cuban missile crisis: suppose a McGovern or Dukakis or Carter had been in the Oval Office then. In the Daily Telegraph, Adam Nicolson professes to be in favour of ‘deterrence’. But deterrence depends on plausibility. When Saddam switches on CNN and sees Adam Nicolson standing in Downing Street pre-emptively chanting ‘Shame! Shame!’ over the mere possibility of a ludicrously antiquated vision of a prolonged siege of Baghdad, he might reasonably question how serious Nicolson would be about nuking the joint. The wily old monster might wonder, if he were to lob a small nuke at, say, Tel Aviv, whether the shame set would really have the stomach for full-blown retaliation with massive civilian casualties, or whether they’d be back in the streets chanting that ‘violence only breeds more violence’. He might conclude that a system of deterrence between a gangster and a ladies’ luncheon club will deter the latter and leave him free to do pretty much what he wants.
If you believe, like Nelson Mandela, that Bush is the problem not Saddam, then the above makes perfect sense. But I wonder if the rest of the anti-Yank set have thought it through. When they bitch about America’s warmongering but think the UN’s the perfect vehicle to restrain it, you know they’re just posing, and that, though they may routinely say that ‘Bush frightens me’, they’re not frightened at all. America could project itself anywhere and blow up anything, but it doesn’t. It could tell the UN to go fuck itself, but it’s not that impolite. Imagine any previous power of the last thousand years with America’s unrivalled hegemony and unparalleled military superiority in a unipolar world with nothing to stand in its way but UN resolutions. Pick whoever you like: the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, the Third Reich, the Habsburgs, Tsarist Russia, Napoleon, Spain, the Vikings. That’s really ‘frightening’. I’ve now read a gazillion columns beginning, ‘He’s a dangerous madman with weapons of mass destruction. No, not Saddam. George W. Bush.’ It barely works as a joke never mind a real threat. The fact that, in all the torrent of anti-Americanism, there’s no serious thought given to how to reverse it nor any urgency about doing so tells you precisely how frightening and dangerous these folks really think the Great Satan is.
But the problem is this. Before 11 September, most Americans tolerated the anti-Yank diatribes from Europe as a quaint example of the local culture. Filtered through the smoke of the World Trade Center, it’s no longer quite so cute. The real phenomenon of the last year is not Europe’s anti-Americanism, which has always existed, but a deep, pervasive and wholly new American weariness with Europe. Saddam’s creditors in Moscow and under-the-table trading partners in Paris, his useful idiots in Europe and kindred spirits in the thug states may yet team up to stymie America at the UN and those 150,000 ‘peace’ marchers will cheer. But be careful what you wish for.
I had to repeat it.
Oh, how I hope it is so. fsf
If you visit my Freep Video (QuickTime required), you'll find the anti-war protesters last weekend didn't even have enough people to hold up their sign (a scene about 3/4 through).
If you liked this column, it should give you a laugh :-).
D
Before 11 September, most Americans tolerated the anti-Yank diatribes from Europe as a quaint example of the local culture. Filtered through the smoke of the World Trade Center, it’s no longer quite so cute.
So many good quotes per column. Typical Mark Steyn.
Gee Mark, tell us what you really think! Har!!
So there is still a segment of the British population who thinks the best way to fight is to send men in formation and let everyone line up and shoot at each other? I think I'll take Francis "The Swamp Fox" Marion's approach over there way.
Got that, Fritz?
I love this line, but I think that the good author has underestimated MY weariness with the EuroTrash.
No offense to the Brits -- I don't consider them Europeans and most of my Brit friends agree.
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