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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (52542)	10/17/2002 4:23:38 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi LindyBill - I would be happy to give my opinion on any article you care to post, but this one is too obviously opinionated - all the judgements are in the first paragraph, and they are no less than "European irrationalism and weakness" and "The whole Europe is sick". Just to point to a few mistakes just in the first paragraph: the hostile attitude of some Europeans to U.S. efforts to take the war against terrorism Not really. Europe was fully behind the US when the "war against terrorism" started, although the rhetoric employed ("Good against evil", "axis of evil", etc) was found rather strange. Europe started criticising the US when the US Administration made it clear that their "war" would not stop at Afghanistan and that they would bend the law as they see fit with the people captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. the suggestion, by Nobel jurors, that Jimmy Carter deserved the Peace Prize for his opposition to war with Iraq. This is plain simple wrong. Carter may not have been the best US president, but he did work quite hard on peace while in power and especially afterwards. He did win my heart by his article in IHT which I posted here at some point, but I doubt if it was the sole reason for his Nobel nomination. They are puzzled by European irrationalism and weakness The sentence above could perhaps be a little more acceptable had it said "... what they see as European irrationalism...". Can someone out there explain what this author might be referring to as "European irrationalism"? I would be interested to hear this one... As for the "weakness", please consider the possibility that there may be other reasons than weakness for a group of people to not choose violence. The whole of Europe is sick. No comment here. Who does not think like Mr Johnson is obviously sick. Modesty, I recently heard, is not a virtue when you are right :) The rest of the article is no better. I am sorry, LindyBill, but this is not a serious article.

To: LindyBill who wrote (52542)	10/17/2002 5:58:39 AM
From: Elsewhere	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

European anti-Americanism reflects a deeper malaise There is no anti-Americanism but anti-unilateralism. They are puzzled by European irrationalism and weakness. I could post a long list of technologies where Europe is better than the USA. I have tried more humorous examples like cleaning robots but I can also name more serious products like passenger jets. Boeing slipping to No. 2 as Airbus rises biz.yahoo.com If you start discussing subsidies for Airbus I can start discussing tax advantages for Boeing. capitalism is Janus-faced--it brings astonishing growth and prosperity but at the cost of periodic and often violent adjustments when sufferings must be borne Of course Germany is still risk-friendly, and of course "violent adjustments" do occur. Witness the German equivalent of the NASDAQ, the "Neuer Markt". From top to bottom the index dropped 97%. Investors have lost several hundred billion euros. But there were no shootings like in the USA after a 30% drop. the German and the French governments have gone to extraordinary lengths to anesthetize the necessary pain of recession, keeping badly run businesses alive Wrong. This year there will be about 50,000 insolvencies of companies, about five times the level of a decade ago, an all-time record in post-war Germany. Businesses are allowed to fail, that's a major difference to Japan. Against this background of nervous depression There's no "nervous depression" but a stagnation. Depression is something else. Germany is a peculiarly vulnerable target with its lax security procedures. Germany has been successful in its fight against terrorism in the 70ies and 80ies (RAF) and caught most of the key persons. Where is ObL? I am not looking with rose-colored glasses at the German situation. Germany won't be a growth engine during the next years, and the red-green coalition has just passed the roadmap for the new government yesterday which is criticized heavily by many economists and employer associations - but still it's not quite as dire as some columnists paint it.