Embracing their Helplessness

An opinion column in a Connecticut newspaper today puts on display the numbness of those seeking the empty center of any argument which is often confused for agreement, one that puts the usual inaction of European governments on a pedestal, no matter how dim-witted the statements are to begin with. It operates on the assumption that the US can be European, or broadly that anyone would want to be.

The outlook almost always points an adoring eye to the exclusion of mentioning anything else European states have let fester or not done in international relations, and the arguments themselves almost always dwell on looking for affirmation in the sort of statement parroted by street protestors. Since both camps have checked out of having any real ideas or taken any concrete action in the larger world, they can’t but help but look to use one another as an authority of some sort or another to prop up one anothers’ ideas.

The social role of how and what is said dominates any discussion of this sort. It has a thin veneer used to shield from the embarrassment of having disengaged from doing anything serious long ago:

For some, the response was a study in haughty indifference.

The statements read otherwise like catchphrases.

“Europeans and Germans believe you have to talk to regimes you don't like,” said Eberhard Sandschneider, the director of the Research Institute of the German Council on Foreign Relations. (Pointedly, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, declined to discuss Iraq in an interview with correspondents on Thursday.)

”Talk to your enemies, not your friends” that latest signboard goes, looking to find a way to tell the US to go hat in hand to the regimes enabling the Iraq insurgency. Nonsense – it’s an attempt to force the US into a weak strategic position for reasons of the sign carrier’s pride as if these were matters between people and not nations. They have it entirely reversed: you make your enemies try to come talk to you.

Indeed, said Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French foreign minister, only a broad political strategy would enable Iraq to “recover stability, and beyond Iraq, stability in the region.” That was the view, too, among Spanish officials. “Only political solutions can solve the crisis which affects stability in the region,” said Miguel Ángel Moratinos, the Spanish foreign minister.

Ultimately, yes, but that’s not what motivates the same argument that is nearly identical to the peacenik argument that has been kicking around since US went after the Taliban in novemeber 2001: the statement is always made with a view of getting the US to negotiate from a position of weakness.

At the same time, there was some sympathy — if not always explicit — for the American quandary: This was, many analysts sensed, a defining event, a last throw of the dice that would measure American prestige and credibility against the clamor of its adversaries.

Proforma statements of supposed sympathy are never in short supply, and they have NEVER amounted to anything. Ever. They are always phrased in a way to veil a mood to save face at the moment but try to say “I’m sorry you’re so stupid”.

If you can attribute European shrugs to having an actual goal, it’s always the same: to maintain a strategic balance for its’ own sake because it requires no visible action to support. It’s the same strategic that doesn’t ask why tyrannies are encouraged to continue provided that they conceal from plain view their treatment of people from a sensitive European public who are easily outraged and have had their sympathy exhausted to the point to that they sometimes confuse not knowing about the things that outrage them with things going well.

Never far away though are the usual verbal daggers:

Others painted their analogies in a more apocalyptic hue. In France, the newspaper Le Monde — which, after the Sept. 11 attacks, had declared: “We are all Americans” — published a cartoon depicting President Bush as a bulldozer driver shoveling American soldiers into a ditch in the shape of Iraq.

A statement confused for action and a statement confused for action – the “We are all Americans” has been used too often to be meaningful to any American, and from the week after it was written, used as a kind of emotional set-up to point out the disappointment with any statement stapled onto the end cleft with the word “but”.

Useless. Dead words used solely to find meaning in statements, not actions or even beliefs. They are a vessel of pride, or rather the hubris coming out of inaction and self-imposed helplessness. It is merely another signboard carried by a marcher in a crowd who could neither summin the same bravery on his own or look anyone in the eye.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)