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Friday, February 21, 2003
The Bill Bennett "Well that's different" Award.
Charles Krauthammer, who has crushing self-esteem issues, is down on Chirac (meaning his fax machine and the fax machine at the RNC are both working) for bullying all those brand new countries that just showed up on the US doorstep, like Christopher Buckley's baby, and want Bush to be their daddy. You know, obscure little spots like Poland, Estonia, Romania, Lithuania...call them "New Europe".
The division between the New Europe (newly liberated Eastern Europe) and the Old Europe (centered on France and Germany) has long been visible. As the center of gravity of American influence in Europe has shifted east to the Iron Curtain countries, it is no accident, comrade, that the only state dinner President Bush has hosted (apart from the traditional one for the president of Mexico) was for the president of Poland.
Europe did not take to the streets against America last weekend; only Western Europe did. The streets of Eastern Europe were silent. The Poles, and their Eastern European neighbors, have an immediate personal experience of life under tyranny -- and of being liberated from that tyranny by American power. The French and their neighbors are six decades removed from their liberation. They think freedom is as natural as the air they breathe, rather than purchased at the price of blood -- American blood in no small measure.
This division in experience sets the stage for the division in politics. And for France's fury at finding an American fifth column in the New Europe. When 13 Eastern European states came out in support of the United States on Iraq, Chirac lost all reserve. His scolding of the Eastern Europeans has inadvertently demonstrated how much France's current dispute with the United States is not really about Iraq.
Sure, France has contracts and loans that will be jeopardized if Saddam Hussein is deposed. And French leaders may have dirty hands from dirty dealings that will show up when Hussein's archives are opened after a war.
Leaving aside the fact that the American Tourister luggage set full of bio-toxins sitting in Saddam's guestroom have 'D. Rumsfeld' on the luggage tags, Krauthammer (the irony of that name never fails to amuse me) fails to point out what each of these fledgling democracies has to offer in the war with Iraq...and what they are being offered for their support. Somehow I don't think that they are getting Turkey kind of money, but, like Turkey, they better get it in writing. Just ask Afghanistan or the NYC firemen.
The "New Europe" shouldn't be suprised after spending the evening with One Night Stand George if he never calls them again.
...and one more thing. Krauthammer writes:
France is reaching to become not only the leading power in Europe (hence the pique with those pesky Eastern Europeans) but also the leader of a new pole of world power opposite the American "hyperpower."
Not a bad vocation for a country whose closest brush with glory and empire today consists of patrolling the swamps of Ivory Coast.
Not to mention the botch job they did on Vietnam. Good thing we went in and cleaned up that mess.....
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