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COMMENTARY
May 23, 2002
The music
With parts of New York City being closed for new terror alerts the Democrats going for broke in Washington to pin damaging insinuations on Republicans over Enron India and Pakistan on the verge of war over Kashmir and Israel's Sharon government barely avoiding meltdown President George W. Bush landed in Germany yesterday for a week's holiday in Europe. The word "holiday" is of course used facetiously. While the President continues to enjoy record popularity in U.S. domestic polls and to enjoy one success after another in foreign battlefields and international diplomacy he has the world media on his case and the ravers of Europe by their hundreds of thousands to greet him on the streets of Berlin Paris and Rome. He will begin meeting them head-on with a speech today to the German Bundestag in which he will no doubt reiterate points he made before leaving home in interviews with the various European TV networks. He reminded the Germans before leaving of Ronald Reagan's remarks at the Berlin Wall how the former president had been mocked for suggesting the Communists should tear down the whole thing instead of displacing a few bricks here and there. He repeated the phrase "axis of evil" in case anyone thought he'd forgotten it. Notwithstanding the blizzard of unbelievably condescending articles in the European broadsheet press suggesting Mr. Bush is just beginning to learn how the world works outside Crawford Texas Mr. Bush repeats the message with which he began. The U.S. does indeed want coalitions but in their absence will be compelled to act alone. It will not allow e.g. "the world's most despotic regimes to develop the world's most destructive weapons" just to get service at a Paris bistro. The problem at this juncture is indeed one of political sophistication. The U.S. understands where the Europeans are coming from but not vice versa. Yet while there are genuine splits within European opinion there are no real splits on the U.S. side. (Lapses in etiquette are accumulating everywhere.) A little voyage into pop psychology here. With very little media play most of North America took in the "apartment bombing" story that surfaced in Florida over the weekend. There was a minor police warning that terrorists might load explosives into some rented flat to blow up the building. For millions of people across the States and Canada merely to hear this as a news brief was to realize how easy it would be -- like flying a plane into the World Trade Centre once you're at the controls. And (a) an apartment is easier to get than an airplane; and (b) once you have it who's going to check the crates you're moving in; and (c) once they're moved who's going to know what you're doing in the apartment. And supposing a little co-ordination we then easily imagine (d) apartment buildings coming down to a signal all across the U.S. -- thousands dead and millions evacuated even from those not hit with the economic repercussions that would follow. What does this say about the North American public -- that given such a hint most of us can now make the logical leap from (a) to (b) to (c) to (d) without pausing for confirmatory evidence? What does it say about our willingness if necessary to fight a big war? And given Mr. Bush's good apprehension of public mood (that's how he became President) what would it say about his ultimate willingness to fight such a thing? For the public sense of exposure is not going to go away. It is still unevenly distributed. I am struck both by the number of web readers I have in New York and by what they write to me. On Sept. 11th at least 20 million people could actually see the smoke and debris uttering from the former WTC with their own eyes. It is now written into each of their souls. I have yet to hear from even one of them who is not willing in reply to further such attacks from the same family of terrorist fanatics to take out every single Islamic regime whether "radical" or "moderate". I don't think we in Canada let alone those in Europe fully appreciate the "commitment" there. That e.g. the moment the U.S. enters Iraq Hillary Clinton will cry: "Get 'im!" I should think a strike such as that upon the WTC -- but in Europe -- would have the same galvanizing effect. Not some out-of-the-way Italian train station or even a big nail bomb in a German department store or yet another firebomb in another French synagogue but the middle of Rome Berlin London Paris with thousands dead. Let us earnestly pray it doesn't happen. But it won't be for want of trying on the other side. In the meantime Europe from its experience conceives the "war against terrorism" as a battle of attrition for relatively low stakes comparing terrorist hits to bad traffic accidents. It is something to which they are inured something for the police to deal with something that can only get worse if you pay too much attention to it. Whereas the U.S. has not merely hypothesized but experienced a true catastrophe. Likewise the U.S. commitment to Israel is new still fresh. This has nothing to do with the "Jewish lobby" in Washington -- certainly not any more. It is instead the great goy American public that is now exerting pressure on the Bush administration to be more aggressively pro-Israel to not pull punches against common enemies. The Saudi Arabian and Egyptian governments in particular have begun to grasp what they are playing with. And Mr. Bush has wisely let it sink in to some extent even playing good cop/bad cop with the whole American public the way Ariel Sharon is doing with the Israeli public. U.S. "conservative" commentators fear Bush has cold feet. But if he understands as I should think he does the attitude of the American public he knows he doesn't have to hurry that he can take his time and "get it right". Which means getting as much of the world onside as possible before things really get rough. Meanwhile facing the European music -- though it will get the biggest play in the media -- is not the central purpose of Mr. Bush's trip. One part of it is indeed to get "up close and personal" with Gerhard Schroeder Jacques Chirac and Silvio Berlusconi. But the main destination is Moscow where Mr. Bush and the Russian president Vladimir Putin will publicly sign an arms control treaty to cut their respective force of intercontinental nuclear warheads by about two-thirds over the coming decade while privately discussing what to do with the huge remaining inventory of Russian "theatre" nuclear missiles (i.e. those aimed only at Europe and China). More privately still they will discuss urgent measures upon which the U.S. is insisting to secure Russian nuclear installations against the possibility of illicit commerce with terrorists and end technology transfers to such rogue states as the ayatollahs' Iran. In Rome Mr. Bush will attend a summit that will mark the formal inclusion of Russia within the NATO decision-making structure. (The poor Europeans: they used to look to the U.S. to save them from the Russians and now the Americans and Russians are getting along.) He will also have an audience with Pope John Paul II at which neither will mention recent sex abuse scandals involving Roman priests. But before that on Monday the U.S. Memorial Day President Bush will visit the beaches in Normandy where so many U.S. soldiers fell in a noble battle to free Europe from the original Fascist menace two generations ago. It is the U.S. that is now under attack and the Europeans being asked to return the favour. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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