Anne Applebaum: the disaster in Iraq has hurt Old Europe's credibility

Posted by Joshua Holland at 8:55 AM on December 19, 2006.

This muddled column by the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum stands as a shining testament to the Beltway pundit corps' myopic view of world politics.

Shorter Applebaum: All those countries that opposed the invasion of Iraq? They're looking mighty dumb right now.

On the day James Baker's Iraq report was published, I gritted my teeth and waited for the well-earned, long-awaited, Franco-German "Old Europe" gloat to begin. I didn't wait long. "America Faces Up to the Iraq Disaster" read a headline in Der Spiegel. In the patronizing tones of a senior doctor, Le Monde diagnosed the "political feverishness" gripping Washington in Baker's wake. Suddeutsche Zeitung said the report "stripped Bush of his authority," although Le Figaro opined that nothing Baker proposed could improve the "catastrophic state" of Iraq anyway.

So, the European papers got it right -- especially Le Figaro.

And then, for two weeks . . . silence. If there are politicians, academics or journalists anywhere in Germany and France who have better ideas about how to improve the catastrophic state of Iraq, they aren't speaking very loudly.

Here we have the Beltway pundit's fervent rationalism; a limitless faith that if the West can only get the policy right, there's a pot 'o' gold at the end of the rainbow.

The truth, indiscernible to Applebaum, is that those European academics and journalists can't offer any good ideas because there are no good options in Iraq. Part of the story is that it's too late for a sharp technocratic fix because over the past three years a potent mix of ideology, cronyism and incompetence killed whatever chance Iraq may have had to emerge as a stable, functional state. But it's more than that; the fundamental illegitimacy of the invasion made that chance remote before the first troops crossed the border from Kuwait. Although the WaPo offered a mea culpa to its readers for its cheerleading in the run-up to the war, its editorial writers still can't acknowledge that it was the invasion itself -- the invasion they advocated -- that set off a sequence of events that are now out of the control of both the U.S. and the international community.

There is no question that America's credibility has been undermined by the Iraq war, in "Old Europe" as everywhere else. There is no question that America's reputation for competence has been destroyed. But that doesn't mean there are dozens of eager candidates, or even one eager candidate, clamoring to replace us.

She spends a few graphs explicating the standard narrative of what feminized surrender monkeys the Europeans are -- they can't even fight in Afghanistan, she laments -- then continues:

Scattered across Europe there are also a few diplomatic optimists, people who hope Europe can play "Middle East matchmaker," in the words of one writer, and maybe get the Iranians and Syrians to be more helpful and kind in Iraq -- or at least to stop funding the insurgency. Presumably these are the same optimists who also used to believe that a Franco-German-British diplomatic team could persuade Iran to stop conducting nuclear weapons research. Presumably they didn't notice that the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, held a "Holocaust denial" conference in Tehran last week -- not, perhaps, the clearest signal that he wants to make friends with bien-pensant Europeans -- or that the French president, Jacques Chirac, recently declared that his views on Syria exactly matched those of his American counterpart.

Got that? Iran's despicable little Holocaust conference is proof that it's developing nuclear weapons, and therefore diplomacy is for pussies. That's some grade A thinkin' right there.

With some exceptions, the weird reality is that most European governments, whatever their original views on the war, are either officially or unofficially opposed to an immediate U.S. withdrawal: Chaos might ensue.

There are many adjectives that might be used to describe the almost universal concern that a U.S. withdrawal might unleash even more chaos in Iraq. "Weird" isn't one of them.

Most European governments, officially or unofficially, are also now worried that the next American president will retreat from world politics or become "isolationist."

Putting the word "isolationist" in quotes does not immunize Applebaum from the ridiculousness of this statement. Nobody seriously contemplates that the United States will take its ball and go home. Rather, this is one of the most effective of the Beltway pundits' false dichotomies: we may only choose between belligerent militarism and isolationism. (The same is often said of trade policy: either we let corporate lobbyists write these deals or we pull inwards and stew in our insularity.)

Nor is there anybody here, of any stature, who believes that Europe -- for all its recent economic improvement, for all its trading power and for all its dislike of American foreign policy -- is going to replace the United States anytime soon…Germany is not discussing how the European Union will take on a leading military and diplomatic role in the Middle East. And not even Germany wants any of the other potential world powers -- Russia, say, or China -- to replace the United States in the role of dominant superpower.

In this weird reality, there is a very narrow sliver of hope: Maybe now the Germans, and even the French, will finally come to realize that there is no alternative to the transatlantic partnership, no better international military organization than NATO, no real "role" for any of us outside the Western alliance -- even if only because all the alternatives are worse. Maybe the Old Europeans will find inspiration to support and contribute further to the alliance, diplomatically and ideologically if not militarily.

Ultimately the only way for the West to deal with the new threats posed by a disintegrating Iraq, a resurgent Iran and a shattered Middle East is through a unified policy -- an alliance whose members are not easily played off against one another -- and a joint strategy.

Let's unpack this. Like any good Realist, Applebaum assumes that hard power is the most utilitarian tool in international politics. The only option for the U.S. is engagement -- a point with which we can all agree -- but the only imaginable form of engagement is through the military (or at least is predicated on the use of force).

Here, again, is a false choice; Applebaum is incapable of imagining a world that is not governed by European economic power and moral suasion backed by American muscle. The only other option of which she can even conceive is a world dominated by another military superpower -- Russia or China -- and she's right that few Europeans would prefer that arrangement.

What she can't see is the bigger picture. After the cold war ended, the world faced a "Grotian moment" -- the end of an era in international politics brought an opportunity to pause and consider the fundamental assumptions underlying the international system. The consensus among our allies -- and our strategic class at the time -- was that we should develop a "New World Order" of strengthened international institutions based on the exigency of a far deeper degree of interdependence than existed previously.

Outside of DC, that's still the preferred course. In the U.S., "everything changed" on 9/11, but that wasn't the case elsewhere. The rest of the world doesn't accept the choices Applebaum is offering.

When she pleads for a reinvigorated Western alliance, what she's saying is that the West must unite around the view of the world that's dominant in the United States. Talk about wishful thinking -- what she reduces to a wobbly West whose members can be "easily played off against one another" (presumably by the brown hordes of the Third World) is in fact an alliance divided by a fundamental difference in worldview, one that will not be easily bridged by entreaties for Trans-Atlantic civility from the WaPo's editorial page.

Tagged as: applebaum, nato, europe, iraq

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.