FLAMEBAIT: "Much of what one hears is station identification"

From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Sun Feb 02 2003 - 01:44:17 MST


The extro related issue here is: how does one cut through the posturing
/on all sides/ of important questions, rather than be sucked in by them
along with the hoi polloi?

Suggestion/homework:
Note carefully the final paragraph. Ponder it, if you will. Or if you
can't, notice that fact.

Full disclosure on my part:
I put a USA flag on my car after 9/11. I also have an Amnesty International
sticker on it (two, actually, as the first one has faded). Part of me was
doing what the lingerie shop owner did. But I'm proud of both affilations,
too--even though I disagree with some policies of both, as far as I grok them.

Go figure.

===

Ah, Those Principled Europeans

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

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 Schrφder 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.

I can live with this difference. But Europe's cynicism and insecurity,
masquerading as moral superiority, is insufferable. Each year at the Davos
economic forum protesters are allowed to march through the north end of
town, where last year they broke shop windows. So this year, on
demonstration day, all the shopkeepers on that end of town closed. But when
I walked by their shops in the morning, I noticed that three of them had put
up signs in their windows that said, "U.S.A. No War in Iraq."

I wondered to myself: Why did the shopkeepers at the lingerie store suddenly
decide to express their antiwar sentiments? Well, the demonstrators came and
left without getting near these shops. And guess what? As soon as they were
gone, the antiwar signs disappeared. They had been put up simply as window
insurance ‹ to placate the demonstrators so they wouldn't throw stones at
them.

As I said, there are serious arguments against the war in Iraq, but they
have weight only if they are made out of conviction, not out of expedience
or petulance ‹ and if they are made by people with real beliefs, not
identity crises.



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