I have been browsing the warhard sites, and as usual end up wondering how they can be writing from or about the same planet as I inhabit. This in particular caught my eye, partly because of its hysterical anti-Europeanism, so that the writer asserts almost simultaneously that European govenements need take no account of the views of their electorates, and that Gerhard Schröder is a very wicked man for appealing to his electorate’s anti-Americanism.
Europeans, especially the EU, are quite similar to American Democrats here (with greater aversion to using force), but are noisier and more righteous about it as they don’t have to face American voters or, on the Continent, even their own due to the incestuous nature of their parties and parliamentary systems. This happy freedom from responsibility permits them to act almost entirely for domestic advantage. They need only minimize terrorist use of their countries as sanctuaries to satisfy security requirements, and can otherwise grandstand as desired.
Europe’s peril arises from different issues. They do not seem to have noticed that America’s new
If you take the Bush administration at their word, then yes — they’re perfectly prepared to get their regime change in first. They’re working towards other things as well — none of which they’d accept from any other country — most notably total dominance of space, http://www.space.com/news/space_control_021015.html . They tried quite hard to get Galileo cancelled. Fortunately, sorta, these are the people who mixed up imperial and metric units on the Mars Explorer.
(I’m getting more bemused by the hour. If, as Bush said last night, the US knows that Iraq has WMD, why don’t they just tell the weapons inspectors? Is he really saying that Washington knows as a fact things that the UN can’t find out on the ground? It’s one thing having a global bully, quite another to find out that it hears voices in its head.
Tasmania looks quite nice, at this time of year. Good fishing, I believe.
R
Well, I’m off to see Bob Conquest at the Hoover Institute next week, where I might get a clearer view of the whole thing. Conquest interests me hugely, partly because he was absolutely right about Stalin and what should be done about him; partly because he was quite a close chum of my father’s when they both worked in the IRD; partly because I think he’s dead wrong about the “Anglosphere”, though dead right that it is the only alternative to a proper EU.
Obviously, one is worried about American delusions of omnipotence. But European delusions of total impotence are also frightening. I do feel the force of Orwell’s remark that conservatives (he meant Kipling, but it will do for Bush) can always ask the left “What would you do?”.
Given that all alternatives are bad ones here, and dangerous, what is the least worst?
I am, I think, more worried by the prospect of a failed American empire than a successful one. But I would like there to be a third choice.