Thursday, May 05, 2005

Americans Are Losing the Victory in Iraq…

…I mean, in Europe (danke zu JC Durbant)…
“Two wrongs don’t make a right.” You hear these two phrases again and again in about every bull session on the shop. “Two wrongs don’t make a right”…

The troops returning home are worried. “We’ve lost the peace,” men tell you. “We can’t make it stick.”…

Friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. …

Never has American prestige in Europe been lower. …

“Have you no statesmen in America?”…

I talked to some correspondents from the French newspapers. They were polite but skeptical. They were willing enough to take part in a highly publicized act of vengeance against the enemy, but when you talked about the usefulness of writing a prohibition of aggressive war into the law of nations they laughed in your face.

…instead of coming in with a bold plan of relief and reconstruction we came in full of evasions and apologies.…

We have swept away [the dictatorship], but a great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease. …

The taste of victory had gone sour in the mouth of every thoughtful American I met. …

The time has come, for our own future security, to give the best we have to the world instead of the worst. So far as Europe is concerned, American leadership up to now has been obsessed with a fear of our own virtues. …

John Dos Passos, January 1946

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