Sebastian Rotella elaborates in the LA Times on the increasing rift between the US and much of western Europe. He makes the same points I made last week - that European governments oppose us because their people oppose us and that their people oppose us because they’re pinkos.
Jacques Chirac may have bitten off more than he can chew when he launched his tirade against the eastern European countries backing the US:
French President Jacques Chirac sparked outrage on Tuesday after a tirade against east European candidates who took a pro-American stance on Iraq marred an EU summit which united to send a final warning to Baghdad.…
European Parliament leaders condemned the outburst when Simitis reported to deputies on the summit’s outcome on Tuesday.
Liberal Democrat leader Graham Watson called it “gratuitous and condescending.” Hans-Georg Poettering, leader of the center-right European People’s Party, the largest grouping, warned against pitting eastern against western Europe, or the EU against the United States.
“Were we to define our relationship in such a way that European integration is seen as something running counter to our relations with the United States, then we would be jeopardizing the future of the European Union,” he said.
“We would be forcing the candidate countries to side always with the United States. Because of their historical experiences, they always feel that they can get more support and succor from the American side in an emergency,” Poettering added.
InstaPundit has a number of excellent posts on the coming war. He points out that French President Jacques Chirac’s outbursts are increasing, that Europe is isolating France and that the Iraqis are undermining their military by arresting top commanders and planning to fight the last war.
NATO has done an end-run around France. Taking advantage of the fact that France withdrew from NATO in the ’60s and hasn’t yet returnedfully, the NATO “Defense Planning Committee” approved measures for the defense of Turkey.
If you’re like me, you TiVo/watch Road To The White House on C-SPAN every Sunday at 6:30 PM Eastern. Today they had a speech by Democratic presidential candidate and former Illinois Senator Carol Moseley-Braun. There was exactly one person in the audience. As the C-SPAN camera panned over the empty audience seats, you couldn’t help marvelling at the surrealism of it. All these Democrats are jumping into the race thinking they can beat a popular president in war time. In fact, they’re having a great deal of trouble generating enthusiasm and, especially, raising money. As The Note put it a couple of weeks ago:
We continue to believe that the Six Pack is going to have more trouble raising money (even at $2,000 a clip) than most analysts believe.Chalk it up to Clinton/Gore fatigue; or the lack of broad-based passion for any of this year’s crop; or the Bush-Cheney economy; or all the breath-holding for Dennis Kucinich, but all of these guys are spending a lot of time in VERY small groups and on the phone trying to scrounge up the checks.
The Observer says that American troops might be pulled out of Germany. Now if only they could be pulled out of South Korea as well. We have no business spending billions of dollars protecting these “allies” who want to appease our enemies.
As the news media bombard you with coverage of the “anti-war” protests today, keep in mind that theirs is a biased view of the world. How many times does the media point out that ANSWER, the outfit organizing these protests, is a hardline Stalinist group? Can you imagine how the media would have handled a protest organized by the American Nazi Party?
There’s a good article in World Magazine contrasting the media’s coverage of the “anti-war” demonstrations and the demonstrations against Roe v. Wade:
Media coverage of these two events was starkly different, both in tone and space. The hometown Washington Post started promoting the anti-war rally five days before it occurred. The day after the rally, the Post had three anti-war stories on the front page, and two broadsheet pages inside stuffed with rally news and photographs. (The paper gave another half page to anti-war protests in San Francisco.)On Monday, anti-war protesters were still being displayed in front-page photos. By contrast, the March for Life wasn’t mentioned until the day of the rally
The AP has a story on yesterday’s UNSC meeting titled “U.S. Suffers Blow at the U.N. Over Iraq.” Call me crazy, but a more accurate headline would have been “UN Suffers Blow Over Iraq.”
As I said a week ago, we’re witnessing history here. The US will go to war, likely without a UNSC resolution. The French will likely not come along. This will create entirely new alignments of nations that could shape history for years to come.
Even the New York Times, that bastion of pinko editorializing, has finally ended its finger-in-the-wind dithering and come around to supporting war with Iraq:
As much as the feuding members of the United Nations Security Council might like Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei to settle the question of war or peace with Iraq, these two mild-mannered civil servants can’t make that fateful judgment. All they can do, which they did again yesterday, is to tell the Council how their inspection efforts are faring. So-so was the answer. It’s up to the Council members
I’m sure you’ll be saturated by coverage about the UN’s dithering today over Iraq.
The bottom line, though, is this: The US will have to go to war without a new Security Council resolution. Expect the White House to start laying the groundwork for war with PR moves featuring allies, such as the 16 (of 19) NATO members who back us on this and 18 European countries who have signed on to various declarations backing the US. These PR moves will be essential to give the White House cover as well as give some of our allies something to mollify their restive electorates.