[Futurework] Separating the wheat from the chaff

[Karen Watters Cole]

Two opinions from Americans who travel overseas a lot and write home about it.  These are on the state of the European mind, something we seem to want to know more about than we did two years ago.  Interesting, with a few surprises for those of you expecting to hear yet another American bashing piece from Old Europe.  You did hear that Rumsfeld tried to recover on that comment about Old Europe by explaining that at his age, “old” is a term of endearment?   How much is Europe’s bluster from jealousy and how much from conviction?  As Keith says, I “have a lot of time” to listen to Europeans who talk of the terrors of war in their own neighborhoods, of the huge effort and cost to rebuild and recover after nationalistic movements brought them to war time and time again, because they speak from experience we have very little of in the States (unless you were defeated Southerners or American natives).    But as with all conversations, when one is simply justifying a position because it makes one feel or look better, not because you can defend it or it makes more sense for the greater public good, it’s fair to ask for a second opinion.  Our job at home is to make sure our arguments hold up.    And of course, if we are brave or blunt enough to address the structural gap between the US and Europe, the one that begets a “yawning power gap” which begets other problems, we should pause to remember that America’s superpower status is built from an economic engine, and powered by military supremacy.  Without those, what would we be?  More international and collaborative?  - Karen   It’s Time to Talk to the World: Rising anti-Americanism makes it more and more difficult for foreign politicians to back U.S. actions, even when they agree with them By Fareed Zakaria, NEWSWEEK   Jan. 27 issue — The prospects of war are rising and so is opposition to it.  The American president and British prime minister stand fast, but everywhere else there is nervousness.  In France, for example, almost two thirds of those polled are opposed to a war.  In Turkey, a majority of the public disagrees with its government’s support of the United States.   The mood today?  Nope, it’s actually a description of January 1991, the eve of the gulf war.  It’s a time that senior Bush officials well remember, since they conducted that war.  And it had a happy ending.  In France, for example, once the war was underway, the poll numbers flipped and two thirds of the public supported the military action.  The lesson: forge ahead, and if you are successful, your allies will come around. But while victory in a second gulf war will make many doubters change their minds, the political climate today is fundamentally different from 1991.  For one thing, the numbers are truly staggering.  In Germany, 81 percent oppose a war; in France, 82 percent.  Last week in Turkey, the antiwar numbers reached 87 percent.  The Bush administration has made much of the support of Vaclav Havel.  But almost two thirds of the Czech people oppose participating in a war.  Even in Poland, probably the most pro-American country in the world (along with Israel), support for the war is low.  Only 6 percent of Poles support a war regardless of what happens with the inspections.  Even if the inspectors “prove that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction,” that number rises to just 24 percent.  On the other hand, 34 percent of Poles oppose a war regardless of the circumstances.   “This is a very different atmosphere from 1991,” says Josef Joffe, editor of the German weekly Die Zeit.  In 1991, the allies still believed that they needed America to protect them.  The cold war may have been ending but the framework of international politics hadn’t really shifted.  Joffe explains: “While there was an anti-American left, there was always a pro-American center-right that dominated Europe’s politics.  Now we have a bipartisan suspicion of the United States.” Today America’s allies worry about a new threat—America.  Of course they don’t think that the United States wants to conquer them, but they worry about living in an American-dominated world in which their national destinies are shaped by Washington. American power has brought peace and liberty to countless places around the globe—especially to Western Europe.  American power helped created a more civilized world in the Balkans.  Despite Washington’s tentative approach toward nation-building, the war in Afghanistan has vastly improved the lives of the Afghan people.  And a war in Iraq—if followed by truly ambitious postwar reconstruction—could transform Iraq and prod reform in the Middle East.  And yet it is easy to understand that for most countries, even if all this is true, it only heightens their sense of powerlessness in this new world. Finish this @ @ http://www.msnbc.com/news/861321.asp?0bl=-0   Ah, Those Principled Europeans By Thomas L. Friedman, NYT, 02.02.03 BRUSSELS -- Last week I went to lunch at the Hotel Schweizerhof in Davos, Switzerland, and discovered why America and Europe are at odds.  At the bottom of the lunch menu was a list of the countries that the lamb, beef and chicken came from.  But next to the meat imported from the U.S. was a tiny asterisk, which warned that it might contain genetically modified organisms — G.M.O.'s.   My initial patriotic instinct was to order the U.S. beef and ask for it "tartare," just for spite.  But then I and my lunch guest just looked at each other and had a good laugh.  How quaint! we said.  Europeans, out of some romantic rebellion against America and high technology, were shunning U.S.-grown food containing G.M.O.'s — even though there is no scientific evidence that these are harmful.  But practically everywhere we went in Davos, Europeans were smoking cigarettes — with their meals, coffee or conversation — even though there is indisputable scientific evidence that smoking can kill you.  In fact, I got enough secondhand smoke just dining in Europe last week to make me want to have a chest X-ray.   So pardon me if I don't take seriously all the Euro-whining about the Bush policies toward Iraq — for one very simple reason: It strikes me as deeply unserious.  It's not that there are no serious arguments to be made against war in Iraq.  There are plenty.  It's just that so much of what one hears coming from German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French President Jacques Chirac are not serious arguments.  They are station identification.   They are not the arguments of people who have really gotten beyond the distorted Arab press and tapped into what young Arabs are saying about their aspirations for democracy and how much they blame Saddam Hussein and his ilk for the poor state of their region.  Rather, they are the diplomatic equivalent of smoking cancerous cigarettes while rejecting harmless G.M.O.'s — an assertion of identity by trying to be whatever the Americans are not, regardless of the real interests or stakes.   And where this comes from, alas, is weakness.  Being weak after being powerful is a terrible thing.  It can make you stupid.  It can make you reject U.S. policies simply to differentiate yourself from the world's only superpower.  Or, in the case of Mr. Chirac, it can even prompt you to invite Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe — a terrible tyrant — to visit Paris just to spite Tony Blair.  Ah, those principled French.   "Power corrupts, but so does weakness," said Josef Joffe, editor of Germany's Die Zeit newspaper.  “And absolute weakness corrupts absolutely.  We are now living through the most critical watershed of the postwar period, with enormous moral and strategic issues at stake, and the only answer many Europeans offer is to constrain and contain American power.  So by default they end up on the side of Saddam, in an intellectually corrupt position."   The more one sees of this, the more one is convinced that the historian Robert Kagan, in his very smart new book "Of Paradise and Power," is right: "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus."  There is now a structural gap between America and Europe, which derives from the yawning power gap, and this produces all sorts of resentments, insecurities and diverging attitudes as to what constitutes the legitimate exercise of force.   Finish this @ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/opinion/02FRIE.html Outgoing mail scanned by NAV 2002