Title: OT:FW: [globalnews] EU vs. US: Europeans Fear Bush Heir to Global Ambitions of Hitler, Stalin
International Herald Tribune
Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
Europe and America: Some know more about war
William Pfaff IHT
Monday, January 27, 2003
Europe and America
PARIS The crisis between Americans and the Germans and French over war in Iraq only superficially arises from the Bush administration's determination since 2001 to attack Saddam Hussein. The two West European governments have seen the Iraqi dictator as a minor international problem, and war against him as likely to do more harm than good. But there is also a divergence in long-term perspective.
West Europeans, generally speaking, do not share America's ambitions of vast global reform or visions of history coming to an end. They had enough of that kind of thinking, and its consequences, with Marxism and Nazism.
They are interested in a slow development of civilized and tolerant international relations, compromising on problems while avoiding catastrophes along the way. They have themselves only recently recovered from the catastrophes of the first and second world wars, when tens of millions of people were destroyed. They don't want more.
American commentators like to think that the "Jacksonian" frontier spirit equips America to dominate, reform and democratize other civilizations. They do not appreciate that America's indefatigable confidence comes largely from never having had anything very bad happen to it.
The worst American war was the Civil War, in which the nation, North and South, suffered 498,000 wartime deaths from all causes, or slightly more than 1.5 percent of a total population of 31.5 million.
The single battle of the Somme in World War I produced twice as many European casualties as the United States suffered, wounded included, during that entire war.
There were 407,000 American war deaths in World War II, out of a population of 132 million - less than a third of 1 percent. Considering this, Washington does not really possess the authority to explain, in condescending terms, that Europe's reluctance to go to war is caused by a pusillanimous reluctance to confront the realities of a Hobbesian universe.
The difference between European and American views is more sensibly explained in terms of an irresponsible and ideology-fed enthusiasm of Bush administration advisers and leaders for global adventure and power, fostered by people with virtually no experience, and little seeming imaginative grasp, of what war means for its victims.
It cannot be emphasized too often that not one of the principal figures associated with the Bush White House's foreign policy, with the exception of Colin Powell, has any actual experience of war, most of them having actively sought to avoid military service in Vietnam. Their inexperience and ignorance could not be better displayed than by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's recent comment that draftees have added "no value, no advantage really, to the United States armed services over any sustained period of time." Who does he think fought World War II - the 174,000-man prewar regular army?
The American regular army has never been truly effective until large numbers of flexible, brainy and nonconformist wartime civilian soldiers were integrated into its command, staffs and ranks.
This has been true from the Civil War to Vietnam - when the system of egalitarian civilian service was finally destroyed by draft evasion by the privileged in American society, and the army was brought close to mutiny.
Germany's current resistance to President George W. Bush's war coincides with the re-emergence in Germany of articulated memories of exterminatory bombardment, pillage, population expulsions and mass rape, suffered in the final months of World War II. That devastating experience has for years been deliberately repressed in the German consciousness, in acknowledgment of Germany's responsibility for the war and the crimes committed by German forces.
In recent months a series of books and articles have at last recalled what the Germans themselves call taboo subjects, at a time when the youngest generations of those who experienced these events are mostly still alive.
This has not been to argue the merits, justification and (minor) actual effect on the German war effort of allied saturation and firestorm bombing of German cities, but in order to establish a moral and aesthetic coming-to-terms with events that, together with the firebombing of Japan's wooden cities, rank among the worst things ever done in or by Western civilization.
Next to this, the intellectually claptrap war rhetoric of the Bush administration seems unbearably unimportant, evidence only of how remote the political class in the United States remains today from all the rest of the world. Tribune Media Services International
Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune
--
"I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the
path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation.
The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."
-- Martin Luther King Jr.
