Letter from Europe
Gedmin, Jeffrey
T here are two general theories about George W. Bush in Europe today. The first holds that the U.S. president is an idiot—"the most intellectually backward president of my political lifetime," as...
...Tony Blair has already fessed up about the anti-Americanism of Europe's chattering classes...
...Or that France only banned the death penalty in the early 1980s, with public opinion following ambivalently and much later...
...Bush has ruinedthe Atlantic alliance over Iraq...
...And then there is the conventional wisdom among Democrats, that Mr...
...It's nonsense, of course...
...Germany's justice minister compared Bush to Adolf Hitler...
...If the Bush administration secured a UN mandate it would make not a bit of difference, the Chancellor emphasized at the time...
...By now it should be clear that hating Bush is merely easy cover for anti-Americans, just as bashing Ariel Sharon is for the anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli crowd...
...So what...
...Michael Moore's book Stupid White Men is a pan-European bestseller...
...Now there's discussion in the White House of inviting Schroeder to Washington later this fall...
...And it will be there long after he is gone...
...The Democrats are being predictably partisan and vain, of course...
...And yet with all this, George W. surely remains the most demonized president in Europe since that other fellow—another ignorant Republican—had the audacity to tell Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall...
...The Germans had no interest in consulting, it turned out...
...Schroeder had ruled out German support long before a decision on Iraq was even close to being made...
...There's multilateralism galore in Afghanistan—some ninety nations in all...
...But if you wonder about the bile going mainstream, consider the steady diet of slander that European media feed its public...
...I suspect Americans would be stunned if they had an inkling of what much of Europe has to say about us...
...When Europeans carp about the American death penalty what they really mean to say is: "You may be bigger but we're morally superior, damn it...
...Come to think of it, this presidency looks pretty European...
...Who's sillier, the Dems or the Euros...
...He doesn't like the Kyoto Agreement or the International Criminal Court...
...The Europeans just seem to be in denial...
...A column in the U.K:s (conservative...
...In Iraq Bush listened to Europe and kept the ball in the Security Council month after hopeless month...
...And what does vindictive George W. Bush do...
...American troops stayed...
...troops out...
...According to this theory, the president has unwittingly allowed his foreign policy to be hijacked by a dangerous group of (Jewish) neoconservatives bent on world domination...
...T here are two general theories about George W. Bush in Europe today...
...Bush's alleged blind spot toward Moscow was the subject of countless op-eds and political recriminations...
...president is an idiot—"the most intellectually backward president of my political lifetime," as British MP Gerald Kaufmann puts it...
...Either way, most people here do not like the present American president very much...
...Under Bush, the United States has paid its UN dues and is rejoining UNESCO...
...Ted Kennedy has been the most recent among our opposition "statesman," urging the White House to be magnanimous with Germany and France...
...The Financial Times's Washington-based columnist Gerard Baker wrote recently of the BBC's idea of objectivity: reporting that George W. Bush eats babies, with a second opposing view added, to be evenhanded and fair...
...He sends his trade representative Robert Zoellick to Berlin, followed by Secretary of State Colin Powell...
...America deserves a fairer shake...
...Daily Telegraph recently wrote of a Bush administration with "troubling darkness in its soul" and of America's "threadbare" democracy...
...The NATO allies convulsed...
...But who's picky about sources when beating up on America feels so good...
...Then he established a close working relationship with Vladimir Putin and dispatched his national security advisor—and distinguished Russia scholar—Condi Rice to patch things up with Moscow once the Iraq war was over...
...Remember Bosnia and Kosovo...
...That is, Mr...
...That's what you'd think if you believed what you read in Le Monde, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, or the prestigious Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung...
...Did you know that we Americans have killed more innocents in Afghanistan—some five thousandtotal—than bin Laden's terrorists killed on September 11...
...Remember the strategic illiterate, the president who failed to grasp the importance of Russia...
...You've heard the one about the "x percentage" of American congressmen who allegedly do not hold a valid passport...
...that opinion in Italy and Sweden is divided...
...The excellent Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-based group that translates samples from the Arab press, should be a model for a new service that does the same with Europe...
...could not count on Germany...
...In Germany, Stern magazine has upped the ante, observing that most American congressmen are actually "proud not to have a passport...
...Never mind that majorities from Britain across a wide swath of central Europe still favor capital punishment...
...In the case of Germany, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder announced a full year ago that the U.S...
...The second theory holds that Bush himself is the central culprit, a zealot whose Christian fundamentalism is driving America's new Crusades...
...A leading Bundestag member compared the present U.S...
...Anti-Americanism was there before George W. Bush...
...I wish I had a cafe latte for every time I've heard the line: "I'm not anti-American—it's just this sick, demented Bush who disgusts me...
...The White House has called for a major increase in the foreign aid budget and an extra $15 billion to fight AIDS in Africa...
...As long as America is strong and Europe weak, apparently some among our allies need a coping strategy...
...Tales of American bandits robbing the Iraqi National Museum persist as do similar myths of atrocities at the holding camp in Guantanamo...
...So is a new book about American decadence and decline, this one by French writer Emanuel Todd...
...Well, it's time to sober up...
...The source for all this is one Marc Herold, a little-published professor at the University of New Hampshire who has never visited Afghanistan and whose academic expertise is gender studies...
...Other senior officials chanted "no blood for oil...
...ambassador in Berlin—mild-mannered former Indiana senator Daniel Coats—to a heavy-handed Soviet ambassador from the old Cold War...
...I remember a senior Bush administration official coming to Berlin last August "to consult" with America's allies...
...It was Bush's instinct to take U.S...
...This is getting sillier by the moment...
...He spent most of his day doing e-mails in the Hilton hotel...
...What followed was breathtaking...
Vol. 36 • August 2003 • No. 4
