When You Lie Down With Weasels

The to-hell-with-Old-Europe movement, so popular four months ago, took a blow to the kidneys this weekend when President Bush gave a speech in Krakow about our Special Relationship with the Euro-ingrates:

America owes our moral heritage of democracy and tolerance and freedom to Europe. [?]

To meet these goals of security and peace and a hopeful future for the developing world, we welcome, we need the help, the advice and the wisdom of our European friends and allies. [?]

Europe and America will always be joined by more than our interests. Ours is a union of ideals and convictions. We believe in human rights, and justice under law, and self-government, and economic freedom tempered by compassion. We do not own these beliefs, but we have carried them through the centuries. We will advance them further and we will defend them together.

But, despite Bush?s new "Vive La France" je ne sais quois, he did get off a few good cracks about the importance of being "willing to take up arms against evil," and how Poland should not "be told that you must now choose between Europe and America."

Comments

[T. Hartin]

Bush did not "reject" Old Europe - he made every reasonable effort to reach out to the France and Germany. France kicked him in the teeth to pursue their own fanatasy of serving as a counterweight to the US, and Germany did likewise to pander to its own anti-American nutballs.

At no point was there a choice put to Bush between France and Germany, on the one hand, and Russia and Pakistan on the other. For the record, Russia didn't help us in the war on Iraq either.

And for Chrissake, when you mean France and Germany, say so. Don't say "Europe." For what its worth, the kind of "human rights" that we recognize in the US are the "negative" rights to be left alone, and these are a creation more of English thought than Continental thought. The Continent has led the way in giving us the "positive" rights that are such a plague on democracies, at least in recent decades.

Russia, Germany, pretty much everyone except France we can kiss and make up with. France, on the other hand, has explicitly set itself up as the center of the opposition to the US. We should do them the credit of treating them as our opponents.

[Jon H]

T. Hartin writes: "Bush did not "reject" Old Europe - he made every reasonable effort to reach out to the France and Germany."

You call presenting bogus, blatantly forged evidence a "reasonable effort"?

Treating them without that kind of contempt would have been a good start.

People tend not to cooperate when you lie to them. It tends to be counter productive.

[joe]

"...he made every reasonable effort to reach out to the France and Germany." Every reasonable effort, short of altering the course he had decided upon and making an honest effort to arrive at a consensus.

Even if Bush was absolutely right, and the populations and democratic governments of (nearly) every other western democracy were wrong (an arrogant assumption to make in any case), it was wrong, wrong, wrong to demonize and threaten those democracies for the sin of listening to their people.

[Kevin]

When did Bush, or anyone in the Bush administration, threaten France? I don't remember Rumsfeld, Powell or Rice, let alone the president, saying anything like that. The media, particularly the right-wing media, said a lot of nasty things, but that's what the media does.

[Croesus]

Oh, and if want an example of a self-made, capitalist man, one need look no further than Beaumarchais, one of the first men in the 18th century (along with Diderot) to actually live almost exclusively from his publications.

[Croesus]

joe,

I suspect this an example of the Pentagon in ascedenance. The argument was made long ago that the US didn't want to pay for Iraq's recovery alone, and well, this is an example of the administration making sure that is not the case.

[Croesus]

By "institutionalize" property rights, I meant to write, "individualize" property rights.

[Ron Hardin]

Bush is right about Europe and what we owe it. He has good speech writers. Look at Levinas on the topic of human rights:

``A rational discipline, born in Europe, could broaden out and be available to all humanity. Into a world that until then was felt to be doomed to an arbitrary play of forces that (natural or supposedly supernatural, individual and social) only counted in proportion to their power, in the obstinacy that Beings and institutions invest in persevering in their being and their traditions - there came the a priori of the rights of man understood as an intellectual a priori, and becoming in fact the measure of all law.''

``The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other'' _Outside the Subject_ p.119

So it's human rights as a priori that we owe to Europe.

[joe]

...and Bush's rejection of Europe in exchange for cooperation from Pakistan and Russia represents a decision that power politics, the "arbitrary play of forces that only counted in proportion to their power," count more than human rights and democracy.

Best case scenario: Bush considers Iraq to be a one-off, with no broader significance for future international relations - and countries like Pakistan, India, Russia, and anyone else with a grievance against a foreign power agree.

Here's hoping. The backpedaling in Europe is a good sign.

[Rusty]

I can't believe that as intelligent a crowd of posters we have here, that we can be so naive as to think that what Bush SAID, is what he'll actually DO.

Bush is a politician. And politicians, by their very nature must maintain two-sided stances, in Janus-faced fashion.

The Bush admin will certainly not forget nor overlook the back stabs and treachery the U.S. suffered at the hands of France, Germany, Canada, and a few others.

This European masquerade was more an anodyne than anything else. More like, "Simmer down, guys, but get ready for some payback time."

(Watch what he DOES, not what he SAYS.)