I see that Kristol is stirring things up in Europe. If you don't like his views, John, think what the Europeans think of them!
washingtonpost.com
Kristol's Unwelcome Message
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, June 11, 2002; Page A25
CERNOBBIO, Italy -- Kristol's War, as it will henceforth be called, was declared after dinner here at the splendid Villa D'Este hotel on Lake Como. He announced a vast U.S. foreign policy agenda, beginning with a war against Iraq and ending with replacing the monarchy in Saudi Arabia. His audience of mostly Europeans at first gasped and then reacted with irritation. "Very provocative," many of them commented -- a polite way of saying that he, and by extension the Bush administration, was totally mad.
And yet much of what William Kristol, a former Reagan and Bush I administration official and now the editor of the influential Weekly Standard magazine, was saying is nearly commonplace in the United States. In Washington, in particular, it is a given that sometime around January America will eliminate Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction one way or another.
Kristol's audience, however, was having none of it. Assembled by the Council for the United States and Italy, it included diplomats, Cabinet officials, academics and business leaders from across Italy and America. The Europeans viewed Kristol as a virtual spokesman for the Bush administration -- not a government official, certainly, but someone who shares the government's thinking.
In my capacity as devil's advocate, I asked Kristol why Iraq and not Iran. After all, Iran clearly fosters and supports terrorism in the Middle East and is considered by Israel to be more of a threat than Iraq. What's more, nothing but the thinnest of circumstantial evidence links Saddam Hussein either to terrorism in general or al Qaeda in particular. Why strike at Iraq?
The reason, Kristol said, was that there are indications the Iranian regime is moderating. No one can say that about Saddam Hussein. He ruthlessly rules a nation that has twice gone to war against a neighbor -- first Iran and then Kuwait. He has been developing biological and chemical weapons, for sure, and probably nuclear weapons as well. America, not to mention the world, cannot tolerate weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a sociopath.
It is a convincing argument and the reason I support the toppling of Hussein -- when the time is ripe. January, though, may be too soon. The Middle East is now roiling, and our moderate friends there -- Egypt and particularly Jordan -- might be endangered by yet more instability in their region. The Arab street may be more myth than reality, but with one-sided coverage of events in the West Bank, popular sentiment cannot be discounted. It is now strongly anti-American.
No one I talked with after Kristol spoke necessarily dissented from what he said about Iraq. Yet for the most part, they could see neither the urgency nor the necessity for dealing with Saddam Hussein. He poses no immediate threat to them, and Europeans are not, as opposed to Americans, much concerned about Israel.
George Bush clearly has his work cut out for him. Much of Europe still sees him as a unilateralist, the president who came into office determined to abrogate this or that treaty and who, either in word or manner, considered Europeans to be wimps.
What's more, the Continent is suffering from an inferiority complex. For years, it was so stingy with defense funding that its militaries were almost entirely ignored in the planning -- not to mention the execution -- of the war in Afghanistan.
Still, Europe cannot be ignored. Whether formally constituted as NATO (with the Russians?) or merely as a community of nations that shares our values, it has a role to play vis-à-vis Iraq. Bush will never be able to assemble the alliance his father did for the Gulf War, but if only for appearances, America must not be seen as going it alone.
Kristol outlined a proposed American agenda that amounts to ridding the world of regimes that are either developing scary weapons or, even inadvertently, supporting terrorism -- first Iraq, then Iran and North Korea and even the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia. His was yet another "axis of evil" speech, somewhat similar in style and reach to Bushian rhetoric, moralistic and America-Israel centered -- and it does not travel well.
But if the case is made for action against Iraq on purely practical terms -- a very bad man has some very bad weapons -- then, probably, much of Europe will go along. This is George Bush's task. He'd better get started.
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