OLD EUROPE'S LAST HURRAH
By DICK MORRIS
February 18, 2003 --
THE objection of France and Germany to acting on the obvious necessity of disarming and dismantling Saddam Hussein's regime is not the first breath of a new age of peace but the last hurrah for fading powers seeking to throw around a weight they don't have.
It is quite like the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Britain and France felt they could go it alone and, without even informing the United States until the last minute, launched a pre-emptive attack, allied with Israel, against Egypt. Their goal was to recover the Suez Canal, which the Egyptian dictator Gamal Nasser had seized.
The two powers met initial military success - but soon found themselves isolated on the global stage as President Dwight Eisenhower, outraged, threw his lot in with the Soviet Union in demanding a cease-fire and pullback. The lesson, apparently lost on France, was that neither nation still had the clout to go it alone without U.S. backing.
The two nations experienced decades of impotence after Suez. The same will be the legacy of France's and Germany's last stand against America's Iraq policy.
The United States will invade Iraq in a matter of weeks and will win quickly. The diplomatic maneuvers of French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will be revealed as the bankrupt and powerless posturing of two has-been nations.
The world will see how little they count and how minor the United Nations really. France's veto and Germany's voice will be consigned to the irrelevancies of history.
But that's the minor point. The major point is that there will no longer be an organization within which they can or will be taken seriously.
The United Nations will not, in the future, be the relevant forum within which to make decisions about international action. Just as nobody would think of asking the U.N. General Assembly what it thinks because it is dominated by nations with no power and less legitimacy, so no one will ask the Security Council for its opinion either because it can be impeded by the veto of powerless powers.
All of these prerogatives will be pre-empted, de facto, by the decision-making entities of the United States and (because of her courage in doing what is right) Britain. If Paris or Berlin want a say, it will have to be at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, not in Brussels or in the U.N.
Morally, the French and German position - and that of our domestic peace demonstrators - will be undermined and undone by the reality of what Saddam Hussein is doing behind closed doors. If Saddam is found, posthumously, to have been wrongly accused and we find none of the horror stories about weapons of mass destruction were true, the critics will triumph.
But if our troops find the labs, bio-bomb factories, chemical-weapon stockpiles and nuclear research programs that Secretary of State Colin Powell says are there, the voices of France, Germany and the U.S. left will be stilled for a long, long time to come.
Why are the French and the Germans walking into this trap? For the same reason Britain and France did in Suez: Ego and an inability to perceive how the world had changed. Just as London and Paris in 1956 did not grasp that global politics had become bi-polar, Paris and Berlin today do not now grasp that it is uni-polar.
In both cases, the powers of the old regime reflexively acted on past assumptions before their irrelevancy was brutally brought home to them.
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