Those tensions were fully on display last week at the United Nations Security Council when it convened to hear the latest report from chief inspector Hans Blix. He had come to explain just how much Saddam Hussein has–or has not–complied with demands that Iraq disarm. Under Resolution 1441, Blix essentially has the power to launch the war by declaring that Saddam is stonewalling. If Blix agreed with the damning assessment given by Secretary of State Colin Powell on Feb. 5, it would be hard to stop a new resolution in favor of force. But Blix didn’t do that. Rather, he chipped away at Powell’s version of events, citing points that seemed to be exaggerated, while conceding that Saddam was keeping illegal missiles. The administration and its British supporters were stunned. “Everyone thought he would give us more to work with,” as one official put it. (BLIXED! cried the headline on London’s Daily Mail.)
Blix’s presentation set the tone for the extraordinary spectacle that followed. The room–the Security Council–was palpably turning against the United States. When French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin spoke, he had a rapt audience. “The use of force against Iraq is not justified today; there is an alternative to war, and that is to disarm Iraq through inspections,” he declared. The chamber erupted in applause. When Powell’s turn came, he put aside his prepared notes. He spoke directly, passionately, warning against “tricks that are being played on us” and vowed that “the threat of force must remain.” Saddam could not be allowed to string this process out. “We cannot wait for one of these weapons [of mass destruction] to turn up in our cities. More inspections–I am sorry–are not the answer.” But when Powell finished, only a sole hand clap could be heard in the entire chamber. Then the room fell silent as the clapper realized that he was quite alone.
The whole idea of a war against Iraq was looking last week like an increasingly lonely venture for the Bush administration and its stalwart supporter, British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Even as the number of American troops poised for fighting in Iraq approached 150,000, some 750,000 or more protesters marched against the war in London, and hundreds of thousands more turned out in other capitals. Many worry that an attack on Baghdad will make them less safe, by provoking more terrorism. And they believe inspections can contain Saddam. All last week the usually low-key councils of NATO were seized by a bitter squabble as France, Germany and Belgium stalled efforts to guarantee Turkey protection if it helps facilitate an American invasion of Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the action a “disgrace.” Suddenly surrender monkeys seemed to be all over the place.
The rancor had been building for months, stoked at times by aggressive posturing from the American side. On Jan. 23, Rumsfeld started baiting reluctant France and recalcitrant Germany as the “old Europe.” Congressmen picked up the theme as France emerged as the key spoiler in NATO and the U.N. Security Council. Rep. Tom Lantos, among others, declared he was “disgusted by the blind intransigence and utter ingratitude.” The New York Post ran a picture of American crosses from a war cemetery on its front page: SACRIFICE, read the headline, THEY DIED FOR FRANCE BUT FRANCE HAS FORGOTTEN.
So fraught with emotions are these accusations that France’s foreign minister addressed them last week in the middle of the critical (if inconclusive) Security Council debate. “In the temple of the United Nations we are all guardians of an ideal, the guardian of a conscience,” said de Villepin. “This message comes from an old country, France, that does not forget… all it owes to freedom fighters who came from America and elsewhere.”
How did the magnificent alliance between democratic Europe and the United States–what has generally been known as The West–reach this sorry state of affairs? Public diplomacy, or the lack of it, is obviously part of the problem. “During the cold war, the U.S. spent considerable effort trying to sway the opinion not only of distant partners but U.S. allies in Europe,” says Rachel Bronson of the Council on Foreign Relations. The Bush administration has often taken Europe for granted or, worse, treated it with contempt.
But is there a more fundamental problem? Is the chasm not only of policy, but of fundamental values, fundamental beliefs?
In some eyes, the problem today is not what France, or the Europeans, have forgotten; it’s what they remember, which is so different from the collective recollections of the United States. Europe’s critical experiences of faith and history, of God and War, are not the same as America’s, and as a result the Europeans’ idea of who they are and how they fit into their world is fundamentally different. Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment has tried to describe the difference in the colorful language of pop psychology, suggesting Europeans are from Venus (meaning indecisive wimps), while Americans are from Mars (meaning can-do alpha males). But if the rift in the West isn’t going to get much worse, as Kagan knows, the cultural divide is going to have to be understood, not caricatured.
Kagan and some French authors–who’ve created a subgenre of books analyzing anti-Americanism in the past year–agree that a basic source of resentment against the United States is a kind of strategic envy. American military power is simply overwhelming: U.S. military spending is greater than that of all the other major industrialized nations combined. Moreover, if you don’t think you have military strength, you’re more likely to seek compromise and accommodation. If you really are powerful, on the other hand, you see the world a different way.
But there’s suspicion among Europeans–despite Washington’s stated intention of deterring the spread of weapons of mass destruction and spurring democracy in the Middle East–that the Bush administration is flexing its muscles in the Iraq confrontation not so much because it has to, but because it can. Its military machine, after all, was created to fight governments, not terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda. This is one war, justified or not, that it can win.
To illustrate Europe’s skepticism, sociologist and demographer Emmanuel Todd points to the fable of “The Wolf and the Lamb” by La Fontaine. In it the wolf gives one reason after another for attacking the lamb, all of which prove false. Then he eats the lamb just because he wants to. “This is all we need to know about your strategic thinking,” says Todd. “This is our Kagan.”
Another problem is God. Americans are religious in ways that many Europeans find almost incomprehensible. “We could never imagine putting in god we trust on our money,” says one Parisian intellectual. A series of surveys by the University of Michigan since 1981 suggests that on a spectrum of traditional versus secular values, with religious attitudes being a key test, Americans are closer to Turks, Indonesians and Iranians than to Italians or French, Belgians or Brits. In most societies, the survey suggests, affluence brings self-expression, and self-expression reduces religiosity. But less so in the U.S.A.
Why? Because in America religious faith is increasingly tied to freedom of choice. Europeans grow up in their Roman Catholic or Protestant cultures, and often feel free to ignore them. Americans search for a faith until it’s a good fit. Some 200 years ago that prompted legendary French bishop, diplomat and cynic Charles Maurice de Talleyrand’s quip that “the states of America are a country where there are 32 religions, but there is only one course at dinner–and it’s bad.”
To most Americans it seems natural enough that President Bush, a born-again Christian, would incorporate religious references into his speeches. His Manichaean descriptions of good versus evil, with us or against us, are rooted in his reading of the Bible and strike many in the U.S.A. as strong, righteous and decisive. But all this sounds to Europeans very much like the kind of theology–or ideology–that led them to slaughter each other for centuries. “It’s ludicrous and counterproductive,” says Herman Philipse, a philosophy professor at the Netherlands’ Leiden University. And since 9-11 this American religiosity seems especially inappropriate to many in Europe. “How do you go around denouncing Muslim fundamentalism when in every one of Bush’s speeches he talks about God?” asks Pierre Assouline, editor of the popular French literary magazine Lire.
In Britain, the resistance to Bush’s perceived “praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” brand of religion is especially virulent. The new Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken out against the threats of war in Iraq. During the protests last weekend, playwright Harold Pinter called the American president a “hired Christian thug.” And Prime Minister Blair finds himself under attack not only for supporting the threat of war, but for sharing Bush’s Christian commitment. In two television interviews over the past month, Blair has been asked if he prayed with the president. An American politician would be proud to say yes. Blair’s response to Jeremy Paxman on the BBC was a terse, “No, we don’t pray together, Jeremy, no.”
It’s precisely these walls of suspicion and history that seem to have surprised the Bush administration in the past few weeks, presenting it with a far more difficult leadership task than it ever anticipated. The assumption always was that by forging ahead, it could force everyone who counted to fall in line behind.
Now, says one senior official, “If we were dumb enough to slap down a resolution [sanctioning war] today, with everyone voting today, we would have problems.” Official optimism endures. “We need to get nine votes and no vetoes, and with a little bit of work we can do that.” But the formulas under discussion are true compromises. One way out of the hole: a series of early, tough tests for the Iraqis, proposed by the Germans in the private session at the United Nations.
But like Saddam, Powell is running out of time. Faced with an impatient White House, the secretary of State does not have seven and a half weeks–the time he took to negotiate the last U.N. resolution–to bring the Security Council onboard. “At some point the Council has to decide whether Iraq is cooperating,” said a senior State official. If it is not, then at last there will be war, and new crosses on a new landscape.
