Mark Steyn: It's not really about Saddam

Saddam is what Alfred Hitchcock called the MacGuffin. Like the top-secret formula in The 39 Steps or the uranium in Notorious, he's the pretext for the movie, but he's not really what the movie's about. Despite the best efforts of the French and Germans, the old butcher will be gone in a few weeks. The real debate in Washington is about the speed and scale of post-Saddam Middle Eastern reform: There are legitimate differences about that but the "post-Saddam" bit of it is taken for granted. As noted in this space many months ago, he's being taken out first because he's the weak link in the chain of Arab despots. All the other stuff -- the chemical weapons, the ties to Islamist terrorism, the material breaches -- is true but ancillary.

Likewise, for M. Chirac, Herr Schroeder and their little Belgian chum, it's not really about Saddam, either. To be sure, they would like him to remain President-for-Life and their joke "plan" to send in blue-helmeted UN troops was designed to achieve just that. This isn't because, as some have argued, they're worried that when the Yanks open up the filing cabinets they're going to find a lot of invoices from France and Germany. As must surely be clear after these last two weeks, Messrs. Chirac and Schroeder don't embarrass easily. The wily Continentals will shrug off whatever turns up in Saddam's basement: It's just business, nothing personal, c'mon, we're all men of the world here, right?

No, for them what this movie is about is much closer to home. To the dozy "experts" on this side of the Atlantic, the notion of a "split" between America and "Europe" is so appealing they don't seem to care that the only real split is between Chirac, Schroeder and Belgium's Manekin Pis, on the one hand, and everybody else. America has never been isolated. Oh, sure, concede the cynics, Bush's Anglosphere poodles in Britain and Australia are snuffling his gusset, but no one else. Well, there's those seven Continental countries that signed that letter to The Wall Street Journal. Hah! scoffed Robert Scheer of The Los Angeles Times, nothing but a bunch of nations "you can buy on eBay." Really? Italy? Spain? Next, the Vilnius Group got on board: That's pretty much every country in the Baltic and Eastern Europe. "Everyone's feeling better. Albania signed on," sneered Mark Shields on CNN.

Oh, dear, oh, dear. Are there no foreigners good enough for Shields, Scheer and the other "multilateralists"? Brits, Aussies, Italians, Poles, Lithuanians: none of 'em count. During the Great War, Irving Berlin wrote a song about a proud mother watching her son march in the parade: They Were All Out Of Step But Jim. In this war, according to the picky multilateralists, they're all out of step but Jacques. Well, President Chirac can do the math: On the Continent of Europe, the majority of nations support the Anglo-American position; Belgium supports the Franco-German position, and the rapid crumbling of support for the Schroeder government at home suggests, if he's not careful, that the axis of weasels is going to be down to Paris and Brussels, Monsieur Evil et Mini-Moi. Chirac is playing a high-stakes game -- Schroeder is merely the dumb moll who's along for the ride and way out of her league -- and it's important to understand that the swaggering Texan gunslinger is a mere proxy for his real target: Tony Blair.

To the French, something very astonishing has happened: "Europe" was supposed to be France writ large, a "union" built in France's image. To that end, they took it for granted that the entire Continent would inevitably come to be as semi-detached from NATO as the French have been since 1966. To M. Chirac, Tony Blair is the odd man out, with his strange Anglo-Saxon hang-ups about the transatlantic alliance. But, as has become obvious, to the Czechs, Poles, Bulgars, Romanians and everybody else, it's Chirac who's the misfit.

Sounds crazy? Not necessarily. Look what happened a month before the last Gulf War. Mrs. Thatcher: riding high in October, shot down in November. She went to a big EU get-together, fired off a couple of rhetorical volleys that the Eurodefeatists in her own party found a little too vulgar, and next thing you know she was being carried out by the handles. The fact that she was George Bush's buddy availed her naught. Arguably, this changed the course of the war: It was Maggie who'd stiffened Bush's spine after the seizure of Kuwait in August 1990, famously telling him "this is no time to go wobbly"; I think it's safe to assume that she would have advised the President that calling it quits before Baghdad and leaving the thug on his throne was wobbliness of the worst kind, and she may well have carried the day. But by that time she'd been gone three months and the talk was all of "no-fly zones" and "UN-designated safe havens."

So look at it from M. Chirac's point of view: Why shouldn't that happen again? Blair's line on Iraq is unpopular with his own parliamentary party and its supporters throughout the country. Why not put the skids under him? Who knows what could happen in three or four weeks? After all, in some ways, Blair is more dangerous than Thatcher: the latter saw herself as an Atlanticist rather than a European; Blair sees himself as both -- which, to the likes of Chirac, is a contradiction in terms. But that's evidently not how Mitteleuropa and beyond views it. Let Blair emerge from an Anglo-American war on Iraq with his worldview resoundingly confirmed, and it's possible that Europe will develop in ways that are not in France's interest.

The EU is far more important to Chirac than NATO is. The EU is a French creation, NATO an American one. So the French decision to block Turkey's request for mutual aid is entirely consistent with its long-term priorities: It has no objection to NATO as a moribund talking-shop, but it has zero interest in supporting it as a functioning mutual defence pact dominated by the Anglo-Americans. For Turkey, on the other hand, NATO membership is an indispensable component of its national identity -- as a modern, secular, western Muslim nation. To flip the finger at Turkey is to risk doing grave damage not just to NATO but to one of the few functioning Islamic states. I think it's very difficult, after the Franco-German-Belgian mischief-making, to carry on dignifying them even nominally as "allies."

The German government is currently in the hands of some pretty grubby characters, the generation whose views on America and terrorism were formed in the student riots of 1968. Belgium is not a serious country: Its last performance on the world stage was the weekend before September 11th, when, in its capacity as President of the European Union, it was at Durban grovelling to Mugabe and Co. for the evils of western civilization. Is it worth maintaining the pretense that the Anglo-Americans and these fellows share common goals? My distinguished colleague John O'Sullivan gets very impatient with the surrender-monkey cracks and thinks the Continentals are still worth the effort. I seem to be making a lot of movie comparisons today, so here's one more: The O'Sullivanite tendency sees this as The Road To Baghdad with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby as America and Europe: they snipe and squabble and scheme and pick each other's pockets and fight over the girl, but in the end they're there for each other. I don't think so. The French have an interest in a Europe that's a counterweight to America, but none at all in a Europe that's as pro-American as Blair and the Vilnius Group are. For them, that's what the picture's about -- and Saddam and Turkey and NATO are just MacGuffins.

For the rest of us, what's at stake since September 11th, since that Durban conference even, is the survival of "the West" -- an elastic term that has traditionally stretched from trigger-happy Texas to statist Sweden. If M. Chirac's vision of Europe prevails, we can pretty much guarantee, from his performance this last month, how the UN, NATO, the ICC, and all the rest will develop. Therefore, it is necessary that he emerge from the ruins of Saddam's presidential palace as dazed and diminished as possible. That's not the main reason for going to war, but it's now an important sub-plot.

I was looking for your comments on Steyn's perspective on the French threat to the Blair government. No doubt they would like to unseat Tony if possible as the leading opponent of European federalism French-style but the risk of ending up with Tories in power instead of Blair seems to make it too uncertain an enterprise for the French.

Still, one has to credit Steyn's instinct that a lot of fish are being fried: NATO, EU dominance, oil control, weapons sales to oil states and others. It really has to be about more than just Blair being a threat to the plans of Brussels and France to dominate the United Europe. Steyn seems to sum all this up in the person of Blair. I would agree that, as much as it is about any single person, that would be Blair. But there's a lot more at stake here.

Blair is getting a first class education about why Britain has never gotten on with the French and the Germans, and why the EU is a gigantic swindle. They hope to keep us down. They want to strangle us with red tape, bureaucracy, taxation. They want to subsume our foreign policy. They want to chain our ability to stand with America, and so on.

I hope Blair is learning that he, and the anti-Axis of Weasels part of the EU, plus Eastern Europe are going to have to work together to freeze out France, Germany, and Belgium.

Regards, Ivan

I think that Blair may have entered office as a liberal idealist, buying into a lot of the rose-colored Eurobilge that was going around. But it may be that his experience in office over the years has brought a certain clarity about the nature of the real world and the intended dominance of United Europe by France/Germany/Belgium. And no other independence will be allowed by the Axis of Weasels.

So, Tony Blair may end up being the best Labor leader in many decades, if not ever. The longer he is in office, the more I actually like him, well, leaving aside gungrabbing and liberal social policy. As an ally and a power in the world, he's gotten much better over time, admirable even. I think that his prior association with Clinton was a liability since Slick Willy was a bad influence on everyone who came under his influence.

Hey, I loved the British crack at the frogs in the Security Council today. "I come from a very old country as well...one created in 1066 by France." Classic British understated deadpan humor. Deflated that pompous frog with a light touch. That was enjoyed very much here in America.

American media circulating first reports now that both British and American special forces units are operating pretty openly inside Iraq already, perhaps in coordination with domestic Iraqi resistance. Any word of that in Britain media?

"Just read the proposed EU constitution...."

I haven't read it but I am familiar with the rough contours. IMHO, We have been too disengaged from this process as the France and Germany try to re-create the Holy Roman Empire.

After the Iraq war, I believe we should help the Brits and "New Europe" stir this Constitution away from a strong Federal model. Failing that we should be prepared to offer "Atlantic NAFTA" status to the Brits and "New Europe" and maybe Turkey. We must not allow our trade interests to be controlled from Brussells.

We have finally had to face up to the reality: if the time ever does come where we REALLY need help, neither France, nor Germany, nor Belgium will be there for us. They will wimp out, if not stab us in the back.

It has probably been this ways for years, but we have politely maintained the fiction that they were "allies" -- partially due to shear inertia, and partially because the reality was too painful to face.

Well, now we have come to face it, and it is painful, but it is time to be honest and realistic and deal with it.

The brutal fact of the matter is that it is DANGEROUS to have an "ally" that is unreliable. A nation makes plans and decisions on the assumption that its allies can be relied upon to keep their commitments. When an "ally" reneges on a treaty obligation, that can have drastic and dangerous consequences. A nation -- any nation -- is much better off with no allies at all than with "allies" that cannot be relied upon.

Perhaps we should count ourselves fortunate that we found out now, before very much was really on the line. But whatever the case, we have found out, and we must now adjust to the reality that France, Germany, and Belgium cannot be relied upon as allies any longer.

Have you ever read an interesting old book by a fellow named Leopld Kohr entitled The Breakdown of Nations? One of Kohr's theses is that the only way that a transnational European federation is possible is if the big nations (like France and Germany) are broken down into their constituent provinces. Federations are successful only when all the constituent units are pretty much equal in size, population, and influence. Both the US and Switzerland are examples of successful federations, because the Swiss cantons and the US states are sufficiently small and numerous relative to the whole. On the other hand, when the US states combined into just two opposing blocs, civil war resulted. Similarly, if Switzerland just consisted of three states, one for each language (French, German, Italian), then it would have never succeeded, because the French and Italian parts would not accept being dominated by the more numerous German Swiss.

Europe's problem is that Germany and France are too big relative to most of the other European nations. This was less of a problem when there were two Germanys. It is interesting that it was just during this time that the EEC was able to form and create the nucleus for today's EU.

As the largest states in the EU, it is only natural that France and Germany would want to dominate. Being outnumbered because so many other states have been brought in, they evidently now think that the only way they can assert the influence they covet is to combine, and to substitute their own influence for that of the US. It is just as natural that the smaller states on the periphery would want to resist Franco-German influence, and to seek to preserve US influence in Europe as a counterweight. These things would be true pretty much regardless of the actual personalties in positions of power.

Do thugs come up with the same solutions because they're all alike or because citizens respond to them in the same ways??

Once in power, the party behaved, in some respects, as Leninist parties do everywhere. It built a parallel party structure on top of the normal government bureaucracy to enforce loyalty and conformity. It established its own army, in addition to the regular Iraqi army, and its own intelligence service, which at first was given the otherworldly name the Apparatus of Yearnings. Ambitious young people were compelled to join the party if they hoped to rise, or even study abroad. Leaving the Baath party to join another political group remains in Iraq a crime punishable by death.

This is an extremely perceptive and astute analysis.. However... what's interesting is that at about the same time as mark Steyn conceived these thoughts, another Canadian pundit came up with a very similar analysis also.

Canadian commentator Howard Galganov published some very similar views in his piece The Iraqi Affair - Maybe It's More Than Meets The Eye.

Worth a look.

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