Europe urges restraint, but Bush knows best,
By Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun, January 26, 2003-- Contributing Foreign "Time's European edition asked its readers what nation posed the greatest threat to world peace. Of the 268,000 respondents (as of this writing), 7.8% replied North Korea, 8.9% named Iraq and a shocking 83.3% said the United States. Good work, President Bush. The Time poll mirrors feeling around the globe, with the exceptions of Israel and Britain. American neo-conservatives, however, will dismiss this poll as just another example of European wimpiness, irrelevance and anti-American prejudice. So will George Bush and his hawkish entourage, who have made it plain they don't care what the rest of the world thinks so long as America and Israel get their way ... Europeans see the Mideast very differently from North Americans, thanks to their long experience in the region, and their media, which provides far more accurate, balanced and diverse reporting on the region than do ours. Americans accuse the French of arrogance, rudeness and illusions of grandeur, which is often true. The French rightly accuse American politicians - epitomized for Europeans by President Bush - of being arrogant and ignorant, as well as loud, uncultured, impatient and dreadfully lacking in those two fundamentals of civilized education: geography and history. French intellectuals warn American TV and movies are spreading 'cretinization' to Europe's youth, a charge easily confirmed by an evening's viewing of North American television ... Unfortunately, the Bush Administration, obsessed to the point of psychosis with Iraq, refuses to heed the cautions of its old European friends, listening only to exhortations of Israel's far right wing, whose American supporters now dominate the Pentagon and National Security Council." |
