Can This Marriage Be Saved?

By Michael Elliott

It was, so far as anyone could remember, unprecedented. Last Friday morning, as Dominique de Villepin, the French Foreign Minister, finished his remarks before the United Nations Security Council, the galleries burst into spontaneous applause. De Villepin had said what most of those in the audience wanted to hear, that "war is always the sanction of failure" and that the use of force against Iraq "is not justified at this time." France, de Villepin said, "believes in our ability to build a better world together."

Everyone sensible wants to build a better world, and everyone acknowledges that a keystone of its construction is ensuring that states like Iraq do not possess weapons of mass destruction. But the debate at the Security Council last week demonstrated a gulf in conceptions of how that world might best be built. For the Americans, the British and their supporters, the reports by the U.N. weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei confirmed that Iraq had still not complied with U.N. resolutions that it disarm. "We cannot allow this process to be endlessly strung out," said Secretary of State Colin Powell. Most members of the Council, however, remain convinced that the inspectors are the best way to defang Saddam.

The Bush Administration is now in a bind. "We've come to a point," said an official, "where difficult decisions have to be made in Washington." This week the U.S. and Britain are likely to table a new resolution at the Security Council paving the way for war. In a pinch, the Administration could live without a vote, but its principal ally cannot. So unpopular is the prospect of a war in Britain--on Feb. 15, hundreds of thousands demonstrated for peace in London--that without a real effort to secure the backing of the Security Council, Prime Minister Tony Blair could easily lose the political support of his party, forcing the Administration to face the possibility of regime change in London. Whether, and on what terms, others might agree to a new resolution remains unknowable, but by the end of last week some American officials were privately doubtful that they would ever be able to get the skeptics on board.

If that judgment is correct, it will deepen the greatest crisis in international institutions since the end of the cold war. The U.S. has promised that Iraq will be disarmed with or without U.N. backing. If the Administration cannot secure a new resolution and goes to war anyway, the U.N.'s relevance to great international issues will be severely undermined. Already, the Iraq crisis has split the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union into supporters and opponents of the U.S. position. And this is just the dry, bare-bones recitation of diplomatic facts. It does not begin to engage the private level of anger between officials on the two sides of the dispute, much less the vituperative public insults traded daily in the press on both sides of the Atlantic.

How did we get into such a mess? And how do we get out of it? Conventional wisdom among members of the Administration holds that the Iraq crisis reveals a cultural gap between the U.S. and modern Europeans. In the snappy and endlessly quoted words of the writer Robert Kagan, "On major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." Americans, on this theory, realize--all the more so since Sept. 11, 2001--that they live in a threatening world and that the application of armed force is often the best way to ameliorate its dangers. Europeans, by contrast, believe that the ways they have handled their problems since 1945--peaceable discussion, bargaining and compromise--can be used to deal with even monsters like Saddam Hussein. Moreover, the theory goes, since Europeans did not themselves suffer the shock and horror of Sept. 11, they do not appreciate--as Americans do--the number of vile dangers lurking in the world.

This story has a kernel of truth to it. Certainly, modern Europeans are Venusians in the sense that they have a loathing of war that involves tens of thousands of civilian casualties, and they do so for the very good reason that they know what it is like. (Americans don't.) But the scarcely concealed American assumption that Europeans are wimps when it comes to military power doesn't stand up. Just because many European soldiers concentrate on peacekeeping doesn't mean that they're cowards. France lost 57 peacekeepers in the Balkan wars and Britain, 27. (So far, 61 members of the U.S. armed forces have died in the war on terrorism.) Germany contributes more soldiers to all peacekeeping missions than any country other than the U.S. The seven German soldiers killed when their helicopter crashed in Afghanistan two months ago are just as dead as the eight Americans who died in Operation Anaconda last March. Nor are Europeans somehow ignorant of the dangers in the world. On the contrary, since Sept. 11, more French, British and German civilians have been killed at the hands of extremist Islamic terrorists than Americans. Given decent political leadership, ordinary Europeans are just as likely to support military action against terror* Aism and the regimes that support it as Americans. Were that not the case, the European members of NATO would not have pledged their unqualified support for the U.S. immediately after the attacks on Washington and New York or sent their soldiers to the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan.

Leadership, alas, is what the Iraq crisis has lacked. The differences between the Bush Administration and its opponents have little to do with culture and everything to do with inept and opportunist politics--in both Europe and the U.S. Last fall, in an effort to shore up his campaign for re-election, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder declared his implacable opposition to a war in Iraq. In January, French President Jacques Chirac appeared to yoke himself to the absolutist German position. I suspect that Chirac did not mean to go that far out on a limb, but then for 30 years, Chirac has had the political finesse of a bulldozer. In any event, if he wanted to get back in American good books, he has not been helped by the arrogant pieties that de Villepin (neither much liked nor much respected in French political circles) has dripped onto the table of the Security Council. The Franco-German political farce reached its climax when Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, reported a fairyland plan--since apparently disavowed--to impose a no-fly zone over all of Iraq while flooding the country with U.N. peacekeepers. American officials first heard of this from journalists, which is not the way in which allies are meant to communicate.

But there have been blunders on this side of the Atlantic too. From its very first days, the Bush Administration has seemed unable to find a way to communicate with Western Europe. The problem with the Administration's European policy is not that it takes unpopular (but defensible) positions on matters like global warming or the International Criminal Court but that it does such a lousy job of explaining the way it sees the world and the policies that follow from its analysis.

The Administration's presentational gaffes have been breathtaking. Donald Rumsfeld may be the oldest Secretary of Defense ever, but when handling Europe he shows all the maturity of a pubescent kid flicking rubber bands across a classroom. How else is one supposed to explain his bizarre decision to lump Germany, which has just taken joint command of the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan, with Cuba and Libya as nations that won't help the U.S. in Iraq? What good was that supposed to do? And to dismiss France and Germany as "old Europe"--as Rumsfeld did--was offensive not just to French and Germans but to all those Europeans who know that the rapprochement between Berlin and Paris is one of the rocks on which their peace and prosperity have been built.

If there is small comfort to be had this week, it is that good politics can still trump bad. Bush Administration officials say they have done all they can to convince opponents of their policy on Iraq but that some people just won't listen. Not true. It depends on who's doing the talking. For the first three days of the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, the air was thick with bitter, often ill-informed denunciations of America's policy on Iraq. Then Powell took the stage. He spoke without any apologies for American conduct, without any concessions to America's opponents, but also--and crucially--with generous thanks to those nations who have helped the U.S. in the past 18 months. And when he was done, the bile of anti-Americanism had melted away like snow on the sidewalks outside.

Perhaps thrown by the applause for de Villepin, Powell was not at his best at the Security Council last week. But outside the U.S., the Secretary of State--not Bush and certainly not Rumsfeld--is by a country mile the most trusted American leader. There is still time for him to convince parliaments in London, Berlin, Paris, Moscow and Brussels that Saddam has not come clean, or anything like it, on his weapons programs and that in the absence of such a change of heart, inspectors cannot--as Blix said--know "every cave and corner" of Iraq. If Powell fails in that task, the U.S. and its allies will not be building that better world together. In truth, they may not be building it at all. --With reporting by Marguerite Michaels at the U.N.

With reporting by Marguerite Michaels at the U.N.