LETTER FROM EUROPE: Old Europe, New President
Gedmin, Jeffrey
LETTER FROM EUROPE JEFFREY GEDMIN Old Europe, New President N OCTOBER, WHEN THE IRAQ SURVEY GROUP revealed details of how Saddam Hussein had bought influence around the globe to bust sanctions,...
...I remember hosting Charles Lane of the Washington Post in Leipzig during the Iraq debate...
...With the central and east Europeans we are still in the dating phase...
...To deal with Old Europe Am44 NOVEMBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR...
...Too bad the outrage was directed not at Saddam's French collaborators but at the United States for blowing the whistle on them...
...In 1998 when UNMOVIC, the last United Nations team, was established, the French had already had enough of containment...
...Europe is changing...
...But Rumsfeld was simply telling the truth...
...LETTER FROM EUROPE JEFFREY GEDMIN Old Europe, New President N OCTOBER, WHEN THE IRAQ SURVEY GROUP revealed details of how Saddam Hussein had bought influence around the globe to bust sanctions, the French ambassador in Washington, Jean-David Levitte, noted there was "a sense of outrage in Paris...
...When Kerry said it would have been right to give arms inspectors more time in Iraq, surely he knew that he would have been stepping into a cynical French trap...
...This was so, she explained, because Germans finally had the nerve to stand up to the United States...
...No matter who wins on November 2, America is going to have its problems with Old Europe...
...With the Germans and French, the quintessential Old Europeans, it is different, to put it mildly...
...When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke of "old" and "new" Europe, he caused a furor...
...As major French oil companies signed lucrative deals with Baghdad, Paris declined to support the formation of a new arms inspection team in the Security Council...
...It's romantic infatuation...
...Which reminds me that one of the sillier things about John Kerry during the campaign was his insistence that France and Germany's absence from the coalition that toppled Saddam Hussein amounted to some kind of tragedy...
...Lane had just delivered a lecture for the Aspen Institute when afterwards, a student brimming with enthusiasm told us that for the first time in her life she felt proud to be German...
Vol. 37 • November 2004 • No. 9
