Some voices in Germany are growing louder in portraying the Merkel government’s inaction as a disaster

There will be an interesting diplomatic moment at the White House next month

muses John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune,

when President Barack Obama presents the Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian distinction, to Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Just what do you say at a state dinner honoring the leader of an allied country that, against the instincts and commitments of France, Britain and America, declined to vote in favor of a U.N. Security Council resolution to protect Libyan civilians in rebellion against the dictatorship of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi?

In February, before the Libyan uprising, the German U.N. abstention, and the allies’ efforts at interdiction, praising Mrs. Merkel’s embrace of liberty didn’t present a problem. Handing out the freedom medals for 2010 — Mrs. Merkel could not attend the event — Mr. Obama chose to quote her: “Freedom does not come about by itself. It has to be struggled for, and then defended anew, every day of our lives.”

Next month, the easy diplomatic course might be to toast Germany’s great democracy, its economic prowess and to let the rest lie — without any reference to a German strategic choice seemingly inspired by the government’s fear of the effect of Libyan intervention on a series of important regional elections this year.

But Mr. Obama’s dilemma is real. The postwar Germans, to their immense credit, are usually their own harshest critics. Should the president listen to them these days, some leading voices are becoming increasingly insistent in portraying the Merkel government’s inaction as a disaster.

Last week, Lothar Rühl, a former high-level Defense Ministry official, said Germany was now regarded in NATO as a “second-class” player

Oh, and for those of you who thought, who predicted — who knew! — that Barack Obama's replacement of George W Bush in the Oval Office would usher in a new golden era of mutual understanding and productive diplomacy, John Vinocur (who wrote about Germany's "hysterical" reactions a month ago) has this:

some Americans have heard complaints from Germans that they were insufficiently consulted as the Obama administration weighed — and hesitated, and then measured out — its military involvement.

Ach ja. Plus ça change… Read the entire original article, also to see how, in the final paragraph, John Vinocur manages to bring John Cleese and Fawlty Towers into the equation. As for us, we will let Kurt Volker, who served the Bush and Obama administrations as ambassador to NATO, have the final word:

As for Germany, Mr. Volker did admit to some surprise: “It didn’t do what Germany normally does — say ‘yes,’ and then not do much of anything.”

Here it is again, The German Question

The German Question is back, ponders John Vinocur.

In fact, it’s German Questions, plural, and fateful enough for Europe and the euro’s future to merit the capital letters.

…The German Question these days has other, considerably more biting formulations. Ulrich Beck, a sociologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the London School of Economics, offered two.

“Does Germany consider that the time has come to defend itself against Europe’s excessive clutches — the German model of success against its jealous European neighbors?” he asked. And: “Has the united Europe referred to in the German Constitution’s preamble stopped being the lodestar of the Germans’ vision of themselves and German politics?”

John Vinocur goes on to discuss the subject with four Germans "who represent deep political engagement in an integrated Europe" — former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt; Joschka Fischer, former foreign minister, Greens party chief and urban street fighter; Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, a Christian Democrat and former chief of staff to Chancellor Helmut Kohl; and Hans-Ulrich Klose, the Foreign Ministry’s coordinator for German-American cooperation and a former Social Democratic leader of the Bundestag’s Foreign Relations Committee.

For them, doubts among its friends about Germany’s solidarity, accelerated since the beginning of the recession by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s perceived Germany First reflexes, can’t be a comfortable notion.

…A darker view came from Mr. Beck in an essay titled “German euro-nationalism.”

He sees a new kind of German economic unilateralism replacing its old multilateral creed. He believes an “intellectual nationalism” now exists in Germany that bridges right-left party definitions.

He wrote, “Chancellor Merkel has employed the European currency crisis to set the euro-zone’s financial policy switches in the direction of a German Europe.”

This, Mr. Beck argues, is a “Germany that no longer personifies the most European of Europeans. Rather, it is one that downplays its European duties and ties. It’s a Germany that has dredged up Europe’s German Question.”

John Vinocur concludes:

Clearly, Germany has changed from the country that, in exchange for German reunification, bartered away the Deutsche mark and the Bundesbank’s roles as de facto European reserve currency and Europe’s monetary arbiter.

The new, most pertinent German Question flows from this reality: How can the rest of the Europeans manage an unabashedly self-interested Germany — normal is what it’s called here — that they hardly imagined would emerge from the deal they signed in 1992 as the Maastricht Treaty.

A Miserable Precedent? In France's 1st Election Round, Extremism’s Total Promises to Beat Either Mainstream Candidate

The election in France on Sunday won’t decide its next president but will more likely offer a miserable precedent

notes John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune:

a success for a “Rejection Front” that combines the bleak compatibility of the extreme left and right.

Notionally at least, with the Left Front and National Fronts scores added together, the beyond-the-mainstream candidates’ total share of the vote could beat the individual first-round scores of either President Nicolas Sarkozy or the Socialist, François Hollande.

That doesn’t change the near certainty that Marine Le Pen at the far right and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the left’s distant shore get eliminated on April 22 while Hollande and Sarkozy advance to the final round two weeks later.

But if the Rejection Front (my designation) does as well as most polls suggest, France will have legitimized two political currents that spurn serious solutions for France’s economic grief, reject civility and common sense and variously propose regression through loony yet authoritarian economics, class warfare, class or racial prejudices, anti-Western instincts, and the politics of endless rage.

Sarkozy and Hollande are each projected to win between 26 and 29 percent of the votes cast in the first round among 10 contenders. That means that if parallel estimates hold for Le Pen (16 to 18 percent) and Mélenchon (around 15), extremism’s total beats either mainstream guy.

This isn’t a nerdy detail, but a miserable political signpost in an important and usually intelligent country struggling to retain influence in the world.

Mélenchon, who has Communist Party backing, infantilizes the French with promises of an “insurrection” that in the face of the country’s pledges of austerity would create 500,000 new places in public nurseries, 200,000 new low-rent apartments per year, total reimbursement of all individual health expenditure and tenured status for 800,000 public service workers now without permanent contracts. It is not clear how the Left Front would handle the costs (the health bill alone is estimated at €40 billion yearly), but Mélenchon has given a hint: confiscation of annual individual income above €360,000.

Mélenchon’s world-view goes hand in hand with his economics. He describes the United States as “the world’s primary problem” and wants the U.S. Sixth Fleet out of the Mediterranean. More: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is a hero, the Chinese invasion of Tibet was justified, and Cuba isn’t a dictatorship.

More on Mélenchon's s worldview: A French Presidential Candidate Vows to Valiantly Fight the American Empire and Bring the World Out From Under Its Domineering Shadow.

In a French political universe where no one need tell a significant percentage of the truth, dealing in fantasy is an easy alternative. The problem with Mélenchon is that his routine is showing it works in 2012 France. As Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the left-wing ecologist politician, has said, “He’s succeeded in restoring national nostalgia for old-time class conflict and statist tradition.”

While Mélenchon’s role in the Rejection Front refuses reality, Marine Le Pen’s National Front summons French instincts in the direction of bigotry and spite.

Read the whole thing but be sure not to miss John Vinocur's conclusion:

Through their complaisant maneuvering, Sarkozy and Hollande have reduced the stature of responsible politics in France and with it given both halves of the Rejection Front enough momentum so that, side by side, they may enter the National Assembly in June legislative elections. Leaving this likely indelible (and repugnant) trace behind, the quality of the French presidential race and runoff round beginning Monday has no place to go but up.

Change, Mutual Respect, and Russian-EU Relations: When the Obama administration stamps its foot, no one any longer snaps to attention

…“the Russians now have far more leverage in the U.S. relationship [with Europe] than they should”

John Vinocur quotes a former senior State Department official with responsibility for Russia (David J. Kramer) as saying in the conclusion of his International Herald Tribune article.

The United States used to call wayward members of NATO back to the reservation with a whistle or a shout. It decided what was deviation from doctrine, and that decision was pretty much law.

When the Obama administration stamped its foot this time, no one snapped to attention.

Rather, Germany and France, meeting with Russia in Deauville, northern France, last week, signaled that they planned to make such three-cornered get-togethers on international foreign policy and security matters routine, and even extend them to inviting other “partners” — pointing, according to diplomats from two countries, to Turkey becoming a future participant.

That can look like an effort to deal with European security concerns in a manner that keeps NATO, at least in part, at a distance. And it could seem a formula making it easier for Russia to play off — absolutely no novelty here — the European allies against the United States, or NATO and the European Union, against one another.

… As for the Obama administration stamping its foot, what it came down to was a senior U.S. official saying: “Since when, I wonder, is European security no longer an issue of American concern, but something for Europe and Russia to resolve? After being at the center of European security for 70 years, it’s strange to hear that it’s no longer a matter of U.S. concern.”

So, a follow-on burst of European contrition? I asked a German official about it. He spoke of German and French loyalty to NATO. And he said, “I understand there are American suspicions.”

“But,” he added, “the United States must accept that the times are changing. There are examples of it having done this. Why wouldn’t it accept our view in this respect?”

The official did not list them, but there are obvious factors explaining the French and German initiatives.

A major one is President Barack Obama’s perceived lack of interest and engagement in Europe. His failure to attend a Berlin ceremony commemorating the end of the Cold War and his cancellation of a meeting involving the E.U.’s new president has had symbolic weight.

… Consider this irony: the more Russia makes entry into the E.U.’s decision-making processes on security issues a seeming condition for deals the French and/or Germans want (think, for example, of France’s proposed sale to Moscow of Mistral attack vessels), the more the impression takes hold that the administration’s focus for complaint about the situation has been off-loaded onto the Europeans.

… When Mr. Medvedev bestowed Russia’s highest honors at a Kremlin ceremony on a group of sleeper spies who were expelled from the United States last July, a State Department spokesman turned away a reporter’s question with a “no comment.” Washington chooses not to say anything either about Mr. Medvedev’s support, repeated in Deauville, for Mr. Sarkozy’s plan, as next year’s president of the G-20 consultative grouping, to focus its attention on limiting the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.

Prior to John Vinocur's article appeared an IHT editorial page column in which Roger Cohen appraised us that

France is in a quiet sulk. Nicolas Sarkozy is the most pro-American president of the Fifth Republic. He brought France back into NATO’s military command, rejected the de rigueur cynicism of French political discourse on the United States, and reached out to Obama. For all of which he got nothing. He must hear de Gaulle’s ghost at night whispering, “I told you so.”

In London, the British are shaking their heads. … “Beside the E.U., is there another bunch of countries anywhere willing to work as closely and permanently with the U.S. on almost all issues of global and regional concern?” asked Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador in Washington. “I wish Obama would say just that.”

Somewhat related is Virginie Malingre's interview in Le Monde with Alastair Cameron, who "est chargé des questions européennes au Royal United Services Institute, un think tank londonien spécialisé dans les questions de défense et de sécurité. Ce Franco-Britannique a fait ses études à Londres et à Paris, où il a travaillé quelque temps pour le ministère de la défense."

…on peut penser que la guerre en Irak a mis en évidence le déséquilibre de la relation. On a parlé de la Grande-Bretagne comme du "caniche de Washington"...

William Hague, le ministre des affaires étrangères britannique, et David Cameron, le premier ministre, ont tous deux dit qu'ils étaient les alliés des Etats-Unis mais qu'ils ne seraient pas "son esclave ". C'est une manière d'admettre que les Britanniques, ces dix dernières années, ont eu le sentiment qu'ils étaient trop souvent à la botte de Washington. De ce point de vue-là, la coopération avec la France sera la bienvenue. Mais, sur le fond, rien n'a changé.

Moscow has announced that the Arctic will become its “main resource base” by 2020, and plans for troops “capable of ensuring … security in region"

During a week when big ideas have their shot at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, it’s clear the Arctic isn’t getting its share

writes John Vinocur concerning "the worst-case Great Game perspective of guns, gas leaks and oil spills, tanker collisions and nationalist jostling". As John Vinocur explains, the (ignored) problem is that

the Russians … seem more in a rush than the Atlantic Alliance players to create their own kind of Arctic facts.

They have experience in the region, but hardly a resounding record as great stewards of the environment. Their claim to half of the Arctic as their own was described in Halifax as “extravagant” by a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker.

In 2007, they planted a Russian flag under the North Pole. This year, Moscow’s National Security Council announced that the Arctic would become its “main resource base” by 2020, and plans for troops “capable of ensuring military security in the region.” In October, a Russian admiral said that helicopter carriers the Russian Navy hopes to buy from France were earmarked, in part, for its Arctic fleet.

But this could be just woofin’. … All the same, said Mr. Volker, who is managing director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Transatlantic Relations, “The Russians know what they want. They’ve got an Arctic fleet, and incentives to bring people to settle in the region. They want to develop gas fields. It’s not military aggression, but an attempt to build a comprehensive presence.” Washington, he said, “has been a little slow to put the pieces together. And we’re the only country to have the resources and political weight that can get a handle on the development of the region.”

You Read It First on ¡No Pasaran!

…in trying to transmute the fog of [France's] runup to the war into glory, the book may provide more clarity than intended: L'Inconnu de l'Élysée, the country's top nonfiction best seller, while idealizing Chirac's role, brings unexpected new support to a thesis that France's government was not so much struggling to save humanity as looking out for Numéro Un.

Innumerable Frenchmen, -women, pundits, journalists lionized Jacques Chirac for "having the balls" to stand up to George W. Bush in the Iraq crisis (not least in our comments section), but as John Vinocur points out, the French government was flip-flopping all the way. As he says, "France's lurching pursuit of the best yield for itself in the runup left it totally short of what its leaders hoped their opposition would bring."

[The book] credits the idea that France maneuvered for months while considering whether to participate in an American-led invasion of Iraq. And it suggests that Villepin, after summoning the United Nations Security Council to rise in opposition against America, actually thought that France could not sustain its position and would "link up with the United States" before the war began in March 2003.

John Vinocur asked Pierre Péan about

Villepin's wobbling. He replied, "It's an ultra-sensitive subject, an essential subject, but one I didn't sort out. No one wants to talk about it today. It's a place where there was a problem."

No wonder; it's easier (including for Péan himself) to talk (and to crow) about principles, standards, and glorious times.

This episode shows the entire French political spectrum locking itself into the depressing cavern of Chirac's political creed

Well, if you can't get a job (or a training course) in France, you can always get one in Algeria.

Panorama, meanwhile, has fullscreen panoramas of the CPE demonstrations (listen to those lovely French songs).

As for Laurent Greilsamer, he quotes (without naming the journalist) John Vinocur's International Herald Tribune article in his history of "manifestations … made in France."

It so happens that John Vinocur had this to say today:

Jacques Chirac is discredited, Dominique de Villepin, too, and with them, it seems, a certain France that told the world it could avoid change and, as exceptionalist as ever, escape immobility's ridiculousness in the process.

Absurdity certainly has caught up with this routine. There's never been a more incongruous political crisis than the country's present misery about relaxing employment regulations for young people: scores of thousands of them - a poll shows 76 percent of the 15- to 24 year-old age group aspire to the privileges, early retirement and ironclad security of civil service jobs - demonstrating for social conservatism on the historical turf of new dawns and revolution.

And rarely has upheaval on the streets led to more ridiculous political repercussions. Here, it has exposed a president who tried to save face for his prime minister by signing a bill changing first-job rules, then explained incoherently that a second measure would soon nullify the original's provisions, and finally turned over the repair job to a rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, who both Chirac and Villepin have long hoped to crush.

For some, this is a hoot. But ridiculousness can be sad, or even ominous. That's the direction this episode points to for the future because it shows the entire French political spectrum locking itself into the depressing cavern of Chirac's political creed.

This article of faith insists that if France will sample the idea of reform, just tasting, it won't willingly swallow real social change. In terms of getting- elected politics, the Chirac precept says that only a presidential candidate who refuses to talk about the necessity of risk, or how France gains through a smaller nanny-state or a freer economy, can inspire enough French trust to win election.

In a new book on the president by Franz-Olivier Giesbert, François Fillon, a Sarkozy ally, describes Chirac as "a psycho-rigid person who's convinced that France cannot tolerate any major reform. This comes to the great irritation of the left which wanted the right to do the job before it returns to power."

Vinocur Uses the John Kerry Postulate to Explain the Yes Camp's Dilemma on France's EU Constitution Referendum

In France, detractors dig in on EU charter

writes John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune as he proceeds to explain the John Kerry Postulate for informed guessing on voting behavior.

As far as the constitution is concerned, the president of the European Parliament, Josep Borrell, has described the real problem as a deep "malaise" in the French relationship with Europe. Most of all, it goes to a sense of lost French influence in an expanded EU, and to the absence of the idea that this new Europe ever could do anything again for France.

Minus any enthusiasm, the very particular weakness of the "yes" campaign lies in the fact that both its Gaullist and Socialist proponents have explicitly said nothing like a catastrophe is at hand as a result of a "no" vote.

Products of French politics' endless incantation on the country's capacity to exist autonomously, voters here just wouldn't believe it — or politicians trying to win them over pre-demonize them as irresponsible and unpatriotic.

So the "yes" camp is stuck with the path of reassurance, saying disasters don't loom whatever the result. That leaves black paint and trepidation mostly to the "noes" and their pitch that the constitution will kill the protection and support systems of the European Social Model.

The only safe play involving cataclysmic warnings by the "yes" people seems to be anti-Americanism. They admonish: don't dump the constitution and leave the world to the domination of the United States. But the "no" campaign's grab bag of dissident voices from the left and right have staked out that zone too, saying a "yes" vote officializes Europe as a vassal to NATO.

The second part of the John Kerry Postulate slides into place here.

In order to beat Bush, Kerry calculated he needed votes from the center. To get them, he promised that America would win in Iraq and do nothing that would look like a dishonorable pullout.

In spite all of the contrary rhetoric, this left Kerry largely not dissociable from Bush on the war.

In France, while the "no" camp warns that ratifying the constitution would put in place a cruel, hyper-capitalist Europe, stripped of its social safeguards, the "yes" proponents reassure voters that nothing irreparable will happen if they say no. The Postulate Part II argues that when you're talking about something grand or ominous, and you validate your opponent's position by saying (or tacitly accepting) it is not fatal, you lose again. (See Kerry on Iraq.)

Identifying the exact meaning of a French rejection of the constitution — its "no" vote would seem to derail the European ratification process — is perilous because so much of the French political establishment has put itself in the position of saying it ain't no big deal.

On balance, though, rejection would almost certainly diminish French influence.

A less reliable France could hardly enchant Germany or continue to serve Europe as quite the same central counterbalance across the Rhine.

At its least reassuring, a "no" vote would come within the context of the view of a group of German political scientists who have warned since the Iraq war that Gerhard Schröder is trying to steer Germany's economic and foreign policy in the direction of strictly national interests.

In their increasingly nervous search for effective rhetoric, some of the pro-constitution folk — unable to talk about a disaster for Europe, or dare say a word about losing a handhold on the Germans — have turned to invoking Charles de Gaulle.

He would have voted "yes" in the referendum, they claim.

The fact is, as he threatened and on schedule, de Gaulle resigned from office in 1969 the day after his project for French regional restructuring was voted down in a national referendum.

In terms of France and its politics' eternal call to grandeur and vision, or of Chirac, who has not laid his job on the line to save Europe's constitution, that seems long, long ago.

Vinocur I: France and Germany Turning Down the Heat

In a front-page article in the International Herald Tribune, John Vinocur notes that

France and Germany have been strikingly discreet about America's new troubles in Iraq, reflecting what appears to be their judgment that the country's instability threatens any positive development in the Middle East over the long term.

"No one has any interest in an American fiasco," the former French foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, said Friday. That did not take in the schadenfreude of some French and German commentary, but it had the sound of an operative formula to describe a situation in which Washington's misery did not objectively equal Paris' or Berlin's gain.

In attempting to draw closer to the United States over the past months — the Germans actively, with American backing; the French in a less public mode — the two countries set courses for improving trans-Atlantic relations that would be destroyed by Iraq-related ironies or we-told-you-so's from ranking officials.

Besides, the French and Germans shared an absence of alternatives and an element of direct self-interest. With time, France and Germany's attempt to turn Europe against the United States in the run-up to the war has come to be regarded by strategists in both countries' capitals as a tactical mistake that resulted instead in a majority of the 25 European Union countries opposing the French-German drive for European pre-eminence.

In a Europe greatly weakened by its fractures over the war, and frightened now by terrorism on its soil, the error of trying to turn the Americans into the ultimate villains in Iraq while they are still the ultimate guarantors of European security was clearly not one the French and Germans would repeat.

In Germany, where a poll on Thursday found that 53 percent wanted the Americans to pull out of Iraq, the government had a rather different stance. Weeks ago, Defense Minister Peter Struck, in suggesting that a Spanish troop withdrawal would be unwise, said an American pullback would mean total instability.

Since January, while refusing to supply troops for Iraq, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's government has given its approval to the grand lines of a Bush administration initiative for the Greater Middle East, signed a German-American Alliance for the 21st Century that stresses common goals in the region, and, through Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, defined "Jihadist terrorism" as "the new totalitarianism" that constitutes the greatest threat to global security.

In France ... [Jacques] Chirac's opportunities to maneuver were limited. He is hemmed in by the reality that his surge in popularity at home during the 2003 Iraq debate has dissipated into his current grief-filled domestic political situation.

At the same time, he faces a series of encounters with President George W. Bush and other leaders at four major international meetings through the month of June — with sentiment in favor of righting the situation in Iraq unmistakably outweighing interest in doling out blame.

In a sense, Germany and France's options were also limited by the reality that it was no longer possible to justify countering American policy by the selective demonization of the Bush Administration.

Just as John Kerry had called on the new Socialist prime minister of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to reconsider his pledge to bring Spanish forces home from Iraq, the Democratic candidate's reaction on Thursday to the worsening military situation hardly let Europe off the hook from its faulty presumption that no unified American view existed on Europe's ongoing share of Iraqi responsibilities.

"No European country," said Kerry, "is made safe by a failed Iraq, yet those countries are distinctly absent from the risk bearing."

Perhaps remarkably, some French commentators appeared to be taking the idea to heart that assisting the Americans, however passively, in Iraq is the best alternative to chaos in the Middle East.

Le Figaro, in an editorial, said that since the United States was not going to clear out of Iraq, "France would be well advised to abstain from diplomatically harassing its ally on the question of the handover of power, and to stop continuously referring everything to the United Nations."

Vinocur's article ends with Le Monde's correspondent in Baghdad presenting a revisionist account of where France's excellent view of its own record stops in explaining how Iraq had gotten to where it was.

Without directly touching on it, the report presaged French discretion on America's grief of the moment.

It said: "Iraqis remain exceedingly critical of French policy. Contrary to what Europeans often think, the fact of having opposed the American occupation does absolutely nothing to boost the popularity of Europe or of a given country in Iraq."

"French policy over the past year is severely criticized," the correspondent continued. "It's impossible to find anyone, apart from a few out-of-work Baathist officials, who support the French position over the Iraq crisis."

Multiculturalism is a doctrine of avoidance, placing emphasis on heritage rather than openness, and tolerating pretty much everything

Surely, you could think, the Oslo mass murders might well bring some moderation to Europe’s far-right populist parties in their unyielding denigration of Islam and their Armageddon-is-nigh vision of a future shared with Muslim immigrants

writes John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune.

At the same time, since Norway’s massacre led to statements by populist leaders rejecting violence, you might also suppose that the European left could ease up on its resistance to the idea that multiculturalism has brought parallel societies, disrespect for national laws and traditions, and a threatened sense of identity to countries with hundreds of years of democratic history.

Neither assumption is hopeless. But each enters the area of very wishful, perhaps naïve surmise.

… Now the Dutch are dealing with the fact (and its potential political impact and manipulation) that Anders Behring Breivik, the confessed Oslo killer, spoke in his 1,518-page manifesto of his admiration for Geert Wilders.

Of course, alongside his stated hatred of multiculturalism and Muslim immigrants, Mr. Breivik also said confusedly that the Europeans he most wanted to meet were Pope Benedict and Vladimir V. Putin (whose vision of “democracy” appealed to him), that he read Homer, Kafka, John Stuart Mill and Winston Churchill, and liked Lacoste shirts and Chanel Platinum Egoiste cologne.

In any case, the reaction here, at its most shrill, was at screech level.

At one extreme, talking of Mr. Wilders in a radio interview, Gerard Spong, a lawyer, accused him of having “Norwegian blood on his lips.”

“Wilders has full responsibility for this,” Mr. Spong said of the murders. “He contributed to the development and the acts” of the killer. (An attempt supported by Mr. Spong and Islamic officials to bring defamation charges against Mr. Wilders for anti-Islam statements ended in his acquittal this year.)

Now the Dutch are dealing with the fact (and its potential political impact and manipulation) that Anders Behring Breivik, the confessed Oslo killer, spoke in his 1,518-page manifesto of his admiration for Geert Wilders.

Of course, alongside his stated hatred of multiculturalism and Muslim immigrants, Mr. Breivik also said confusedly that the Europeans he most wanted to meet were Pope Benedict and Vladimir V. Putin (whose vision of “democracy” appealed to him), that he read Homer, Kafka, John Stuart Mill and Winston Churchill, and liked Lacoste shirts and Chanel Platinum Egoiste cologne.

In any case, the reaction here, at its most shrill, was at screech level.

At one extreme, talking of Mr. Wilders in a radio interview, Gerard Spong, a lawyer, accused him of having “Norwegian blood on his lips.”

“Wilders has full responsibility for this,” Mr. Spong said of the murders. “He contributed to the development and the acts” of the killer. (An attempt supported by Mr. Spong and Islamic officials to bring defamation charges against Mr. Wilders for anti-Islam statements ended in his acquittal this year.)

“Wilders has full responsibility for this,” Mr. Spong said of the murders. “He contributed to the development and the acts” of the killer. (An attempt supported by Mr. Spong and Islamic officials to bring defamation charges against Mr. Wilders for anti-Islam statements ended in his acquittal this year.)

… In a new book, “Immigrant Nations,” Paul Scheffer, a Dutch political scientist, has restated his opposition to multiculturalism in nonconfrontational terms that may have appeal to the left. He says that the reality of multiculturalism is that it is a doctrine of “avoidance,” sustaining immigrant groups’ focus “on what they’ve left behind,” placing more emphasis “on heritage rather than openness” and tolerating pretty much everything “as long as cultures are spared all criticism.”

The message from Europe was that a fresh start in trans-Atlantic relations would require the U.S. to swallow European viewpoints hook, line and sinker

As the new U.S. secretary of state dashed around their capitals, Europeans sat comfortably auditioning Rice for the new role they want her to play in drawing the Bush administration closer to Europe

writes Reginald Dale in the International Herald Tribune (where he is sorely missed — the editor of the policy quarterly European Affairs doubling as a media fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University used to have a weekly feature on common sense economics in the IHT, but that ended after the New York Times took over the Washington Post's part of the global paper).

They produced copious reviews of her performance, from the glowing to the snide. But none felt the need to step up on the stage themselves.

The overwhelming message from the audience was that a fresh start in trans-Atlantic relations would require the United States, and not Europe, to make all the concessions. Typical was the comment of an EU diplomat, who demanded "a complete convergence of views," meaning that Washington should swallow European viewpoints hook, line and sinker.

…If, however, the Europeans think they do not need to do anything to respond to Bush's conciliatory efforts, then the rebirth of the alliance will be stillborn. Rice made that clear in responding to this much-quoted remark by Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair: "If America wants the rest of the world to be part of the agenda it has set, it must be part of their agenda too." Her riposte came in Paris: "America stands ready to work with Europe on our common agenda, and Europe must stand ready to work with America."

Bush has been loudly signaling his wish for better relations with Europe. [He] first sent out doves across the stormy Atlantic waters last May. U.S. officials muzzled their previous anti-European rhetoric; Bush bowed to European insistence that he work more closely with the United Nations, and Iraqi reconstruction contracts were opened up to noncombatant countries. These doves did not return with any sprigs of greenery, at least in part because many European leaders wanted Senator John Kerry to win the U.S. elections.

Now, with Bush due to visit Europe this month, it is time for the Europeans to step up to the plate. The obvious place to begin is Iraq, the main source of animosity, where the recent elections have opened the way for a new approach.

It is not necessary for France and Germany to send soldiers there if they do not wish. What is needed is that the Europeans raise the tone of the dialogue far above the nickel-and-diming over such issues as where NATO should train Iraqis, and whether a few more trainers should be added. It is time to show genuine, overarching political support for what Washington is trying to achieve in Iraq and the broader Middle East, without petty, nit-picking reservations.

…That is what France, Germany, Spain and other European critics of the United States must now offer. Their governments say they want to put past disagreements behind them. If they mean it, they should not be calling for better relations one minute, and fomenting anti-Americanism the next.

(Emphasis mine.) John Vinocur follows this line of thought through with his Politicus column, taking the Germans as an example as he writes from Munich:

Diplomacy in action. Here was Condoleezza Rice scooting to Paris and Brussels and Luxembourg, deftly working the idea that Europe mattered and the United States respected it. And here was a group of heavyweight American pols in town for a postscript, attending the weekend's yearly seminar of defense and security experts (Don Rumsfeld and John McCain among the Republicans, Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats) and thinking, fair traders all, there might be some signs of a quick and generous European response.

The fact was that a speech by Gerhard Schröder, billed as a German-take-on-the-world and read out by Defense Minister Peter Struck (Schröder called in sick), grated. The Bush folk, trying so hard to be Europe-amenable seven days before the president's arrival, suddenly found themselves laboring not to look too wrong-footed, embarrassed or provoked by a message from the chancellor they did not fully expect.

What they got from Schröder was a complaining five pages, mostly about the unsatisfactory state of trans-Atlantic relations. His call for an umpteenth blue-ribbon panel to assess what to do followed. …

His text restated his determination that Germany get a UN Security Council seat cum veto power. It fled any mention of his quest to have the European Union lift its embargo on arms sales to China, a proposal that has enraged Congress across the board. And it urged an end to Iran's isolation and consideration for the mullahs' "legitimate security concerns" — on a day when James Woolsey, a Clinton administration director of U.S. central intelligence, was asking a seminar panelist if he knew of a single shard of fact indicating that Iran was not about to produce atomic weapons. (No answer.)

In fact … there was something both detached and harsh about Schröder's speech.

Its tone was nonconciliatory exactly at a time when America was trying to be. Contradictorily, it came at a point when Germany's increasing ambitions on the world stage are most strikingly complemented, as Gunther Hellmann of Frankfurt University has said, by its declining social and economic competitiveness. And the speech's icy edges were such that Schröder talked of Russia with more palpable warmth than the United States.

[A] Clinton administration Democrat described Rumsfeld, who spoke to the conference on Saturday, as sounding more open and flexible than the chancellor.

"The thing that quite amazes me," said Wolfgang Schäuble, the man who may have the sharpest political intellect within the German conservative opposition, "is that Americans are disappointed with what Schröder said, that they found no givebacks. That's quite naïve. There's nothing to expect except a man looking at poll numbers all day and still thinking he'll stay in power if he turns every election into one in which he runs against George Bush."

… in terms of feeling, Schröder's speech was an even less hearty view of trans-Atlantic relations than one offered by Jacques Chirac, mulipolarity included, in London earlier in the year.

Not to mention the hard issues: Iraq, China (where Schröder's commercial interest is great and his responsibilities nil), Iran? Any indication of new German support from the chancellor? No. …

All this forces the question about what happens if Bush comes to Europe and gets precious little in return. Schäuble has said, considering the people in place in Germany, it's no small possibility. Awkward stuff. Not good.

The American in the marble hallway, upbeat on Europe in the administration's current mode, considered that everything might turn around by the time Bush gets to Mainz on Feb. 23.

The American said Schröder had an important regional election next Sunday, and considering that he won in 2002 opposing the Iraq war, he wasn't going to cross anybody up by sounding America-friendly a week ahead of time.

Not anybody, just George Bush. And perhaps not just momentarily.

"France wants to turn the Iraq conference into one about the Americans' withdrawal and, to boot, invite the armed resistance"

John Vinocur of the International Herald Tribune on an odd U.S. roundabout on Paris's new Iraq line:

A funny thing happened to the Bush administration on the way to the boss's debate with John Kerry about the United States' role in the world: It seemed to duck or swerve around a new French line on Iraq that some European voices deplored.

Could the administration have commanded a lockdown on international controversy in the days leading up to the debate for fear of fueling Kerry's argument that Bush gets along with no one east of Montauk or Kennebunkport?

Compared with an alternative but richly counterinstinctive theory — that the Americans and French were running an Iraq back-channel of complicit nudges and winks — the notion of the Bush administration shutting its ears and mouth in the name of election-year politics is the more convincing.

With direct debate with Kerry about foreign policy behind him, Bush marked what seemed like a return to the whack-the-French firing line Friday by saying, "The use of troops to defend America must never be subjected to a veto from countries like France."

Senator John McCain chimed in on Iraq, "Nobody believes the French and Germans will come to help."

But the impression remains that the administration had chosen to let slide what mainstream French and German commentators called a new, conciliatory attitude by France toward the groups battling the Iraqi regime and beheading hostages. They talked of an anti-American provocation and the French turning themselves into spokesmen for the "resistance" in Iraq.

The circumstances were these: For more than a month, France, with embarrassingly decreasing self-assurance, had been laboring to win the release of two French journalists taken prisoner in Iraq. A week ago, the efforts looked so excruciatingly futile that Foreign Minister Michel Barnier offered up a political message seemingly intent on assuaging the hostage-takers, offering recognition to terrorist groups, and enraging the Americans.

Referring last Tuesday to an international conference on Iraq's scheduled January election that the Bush administration wants held in Cairo in November, Barnier said the meeting would have to include "a certain number of groups and people who have currently chosen armed resistance." The agenda, he went on, needed to take up the presence of American troops in Iraq, and specifically the question, "How long are they are going to stay?"

The administration initially took a pass on a response. This fit the sense of a published report (in The Wall Street Journal) that the White House had ordered American officials involved in current international negotiations to be quiet for fear of making waves just before the debate Thursday.

But in Europe, there were people who noticed exactly what the French had said. In Berlin, the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, hardly the voice of U.S. occupation forces, took the statement as outrageous: "France wants to turn the conference into one about the Americans' withdrawal and, to boot, invite the armed resistance. That has the sound of a provocation."

Not an unreasonable interpretation. It meshed with a report in Le Monde that the hostage-takers had "welcomed" on their Web site the "positive position" taken by France on the conference issue.

Ivan Rioufol of Le Figaro said this was another illustration of the pro-Arab and anti-American line chosen by France on Iraq. He wrote, "Was it necessary that our diplomacy so docilely turn itself into the spokesman of a 'resistance' that refuses the possibility of a Muslim democracy?" French policy, he added, "always creates the pathetic notion of being more conciliatory with the fundamentalists than with the democrats who are fighting them."

Still in hunkered-down, pre-debate mode, Secretary of State Colin Powell turned the other cheek. He hadn't read Barnier the way the hostage-takers apparently did.

Whatever the literal text of Barnier's remarks, Powell, in an interview with a French news agency, found no suggestion that the French had presented discussion of an American withdrawal as a precondition, or insisted that armed anti-government groups should be at the conference table.

Considering that Egypt was already on board as host to the conference, and Germany, the key European naysayer, had signaled its participation, this was exceptionally generous stuff. The Bush administration, through its secretary of state, was offering an interpretation of impossible French conditions that literally took Barnier off the hook without queering his pitch to the terrorists.

Bush and McCain's post-debate shots at France seemed to say that Powell had been abruptly superseded. Still, the events had to leave those Allies trying to find coherence in the administration line with the impression that its steadfastness on Iraq could be suspended a day at a time (or perhaps forever) to enhance Bush's electability.

France said nothing about the windfall. After all, the prolonged hostage crisis was killing what was left of its tattered pretense of special French influence among the Arabs. After proclaiming the crisis would end quickly under the massive pressure of their friends in the Arab world, the French had to watch the release of Italian hostages engineered by the Berlusconi government, habitually portrayed here as a tragicomic Bush ally.

By the weekend, the Islamic Army in Iraq, the "resistance" group that the government said held its hostages, had reversed field to the point of recalling its long view of France in a statement made available in Cairo. Its history with the Muslims, the group said, was a black one "filled with hate and blood." If France stayed out of the American-led coalition in Iraq, it was "for its own interests and not for the good of the Iraqi people."

As for the Italians, Danes, Dutch and Poles, the Europeans who have put their soldiers' lives on the line alongside the Americans, they may be excused if the apparent re-elect-Bush episode last week left them dumbfounded.

Update: Following the historic Iraq election, President Ghazi al-Yawer derides one of the central tenets of French foreign policy as "complete nonsense"…

Europe in for a letdown if it's counting on Kerry, says Vinocur

Via Instapundit and Just One Minute: the IHT's John Vinocur, who went to Oberlin, had an article to-day on a U. Michigan seminar (thanks, Mr. Minuteman, for the link) attended by ranking Dems and European diplomats. Vinocur has Senate Foreign Relations committee chairman Joe Biden making the following remarks:

Recalling that he had talked to six European government chiefs about the war, Biden caricatured how they would have done things better. "Blah blah blah, international cooperation," the senator mimicked. He added, in his own voice, "Give me a break, huh."

When Biden offered the possibility, beyond more civility, of a future in contrast to the Bush administration, it was in a plague-on-your-houses context. He said of the two, Europe and Bush, "You have fallen in love with international institutions to the extent that this administration has fallen in love with unilateral action."

For good measure, Biden threw in the view that the European Union will not have a unified foreign policy, and with it, the phrase, "I hope you do, I wish you well, but I see no evidence you're going to spend the money needed" to create a serious European military force either.

Clinton Offers Little Sympathy to Europe's Bush-Bashers

In this week's installment of his weekly column for the International Herald Tribune, John Vinocur describes how a decent American disappoints Europe.

With Europeans lining up and shelling out to read Bill Clinton, he turns out to be a guy who insists on reminding people that two-thirds of the Democratic Party in Congress voted George W. Bush the specific powers he needed to make war in Iraq. Then, piling it on, he goes and says that France and Germany wrongly made light of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

No Michael Moore, this Kid from Hope. And for some Europeans, including a few who invested massive sums in serializing or publishing his autobiography, My Life, not much support either from Clinton for the political notions they may have thought they were buying into with the book or from the Clinton interviews that have accompanied the package.

For Der Spiegel, the Hamburg newsmagazine that has never found an American president subtle enough to match its tastes, this was clearly a problem as it completed its second installment of extracts. In its table of contents last week, it announced a conversation with the former president about "Bush's Iraq debacle."

In the headline over its interview, it promised Clinton's take on "the Disaster of the Bush Administration in the Iraq War."

As it turned out, the single time the word "debacle" came out of anybody's mouth in the Q-and-A, it belonged to the Spiegel people asking Clinton questions. The former president verbally sprinted in the other direction.

It was this kind of whoosh: Clinton said his successor was now moving toward a turnaround in Iraq that might take two to five years to achieve. In Clinton's view, sovereignty was being returned to the Iraqis, a new UN resolution had been passed, and the Iraqis were freeing the Americans from having to decide on everything. …

Although you couldn't tell from the magazine's promotional material or headlines, Clinton also took pains to recall why the Democrats had backed Bush's request for war powers and, with it, to criticize the French and German attitude at the time, which he said would not have supported the use of force even if Saddam had refused to cooperate with the United Nations.

Clinton told Spiegel that whatever the state of the Iraqi Army, he didn't agree "with the German and French position that Saddam never did anything that he wasn't forced into" and "didn't constitute a threat."…

This is a long way from the line of anti-Bush Europe's current decent American, Michael Moore, who repeatedly thanked the French and the Germans for their Iraq stance while promoting his film attacking the president.

In fact, for Europeans irritated these days by anything that sounds like an American's support for a non-capitulationist view of the United States' self-interests, Clinton's approach may have come as disappointingly as John Kerry's when he pounced on José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero's Spain for pulling its forces out of Iraq, and urged the Europeans to share the mission's risks and burdens.

The issue here is not Bush, whose admirers in Europe are squad-sized rather than legion. It is rather that Clinton's bottom line on America's world role — like that, as well, of virtually all the mainstream foreign policy players in Washington — may not jibe with the America that Spiegel, or Le Nouvel Observateur in France, another investor in his memoirs, or many of their readers, say they want to love.

"Bill Clinton was a great president," the French magazine wrote. "A cool president for a cool epoch. When the Net-economy propelled growth and melted unemployment. When the American hyperpower didn't deviate into autistic unilateralism." … In fact, Clinton specifically told Spiegel that when it must, America has to be able to deal with events alone (although acting in cooperation with friends is obviously preferable). …

[Here's another of Vinocur's Reality checks.]

Because there is considerable concern among European politicians and the media of being seen as anti-American rather than anti-Bush, which is as easy here as kicking a can, the publication of the memoir looked to some as a good chance, via Clinton, to be publicly counted among the Friends of a Well-Behaved America.

The most conspicuous revisionist among these was Hubert Vedrine, who as French foreign minister spent considerable time saying that Clinton's America was a country indulging in "inadmissible" unilateralism. This, he said, had to be contained by other countries working together to save the world's "mental identity."

France's task in gathering blocking groups to hold Clinton's America in check was of such importance that, like Marcus Aurelius laying out Stoic principles for political action, or Che Guevara defining the revolutionary struggle from the Sierra Maestra, Vedrine actually made up a list of five precepts (like having solid nerves and perseverance) for the undertaking.

Now, with the book out and Bush's defeat a possibility, Vedrine describes Clinton as a president "who succeeded wonderfully on all levels" and who made the American "hyperpower" both "likable and seductive." In contrast to Bush's, he suggests, Clinton's world was a pleasure to deal with.

But this goes only so far. Vedrine rejected Clinton's assertion accompanying the book's publication that Yasser Arafat's unreliability had been the essential cause of the failure of the Camp David accords between the United States, Israel and the Palestinians.

"Clinton is loading this on Arafat because, however brilliant Clinton is, he remains an American politician," Vedrine said. "He's a bit constrained on this point."

Nudge-nudge. Vedrine is not only saying that dark forces, which he is too discreet to name, run American Middle East policy, but that Clinton was not being forthright about a critical moment of recent history.

This is a French vision, like others in Europe involving American motivations on various subjects, that even when larded with flattering phrases essentially demeans Clinton and other presidents, or presidential candidates, for defending American notions of what is both just and in the interest of the United States.

If Clinton, from his spotlight of the moment, persists these days in saying a lot of things some Europeans would prefer not to hear, the explanation may come down to his being, very irretrievably, like Bush or Kerry, just another American. The U.S. Census Bureau's latest figures count 282,421,906 of them.

Vinocur III: Zapatero's Rewards for Rejoining "the Community of the Just" Are Hardly of the Earthly Kind

I remember very clearly what a Spanish socialist party official said prior to the bombings in Madrid, when it seemed clear that José Maria Aznar would win the Spanish elections. What had Spain gotten from its role alongside Uncle Sam and Britain? Miguel Angel Moratinos (Madrid's future foreign minister) asked rhetorically. His own answer: "We've gotten nothing."

Anytime a national leader follows U.S. policy (whether it's Blair, Berlusconi, or whoever), it seems that opponents always ask what good the nation got out of it, suggesting that whatever the case might be, it is nothing or at least nothing tangible. The implication is that U.S. leaders are a criminal lot, or that their policies are at best misguided, and anybody following them have sold out (hence, the ubiquitous poodle/vassal charge).

As it happens, one country did get something out of its support, and although it may not seem like much, it — along with the simple knowledge of living up to one's obligations to one's friends (i.e., fraternal nations) and being in the right along with them — fills some Danish hearts with pride (albeit of the quiet kind).

What nobody ever seems to ask is what leaders who follow those opposed to Uncle Sam get out of that.

Still, the International Herald Tribune's John Vinocur provides an answer in his weekly Politicus column (which will probably start becoming a mainstay on this weblog).

The detoxed Spain of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, it was pledged, was going to rush back into the family-like warmth of the European Union, and rush home its troops from Iraq. In a whoosh, it would rejoin the community of the just, and end what the new Socialist government called the country's miscast role as superpower-adjunct of the Americans.

Promise keepers, the new guys did what they said they would in their first full week on the job. For which they got something short of an international standing ovation.

The big hello from Europe on Thursday in Luxembourg was an EU decision that overrode the self-characterized Good Spain's vote in favor of subsidies and blocked scores of millions of euros in potential payments to support Spanish production of cotton, tobacco and olive oil.

The big embrace from the forces of global moral leadership was mostly silence — and a statement from the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace saying it did not share the thinking behind the new Spanish government's decision to begin immediate withdrawal of its troops from Iraq.

The big show of understanding and solidarity from John Kerry, the man Zapatero said he would go to America to campaign for, was a comment marking disapproval of the pullout and noting that European countries with a view on Iraq needed to share in the risks and burdens of its stabilization. For good measure, if the difference between U.S. Democrats and Zapatero Socialists wasn't clear, the Democratic candidate for president described Israeli attacks on Hamas leaders as justified.

Beyond Spain's borders, for all the government's rhetoric and its lionizing by Spain's leftist press, there was no novice's state-of-grace for Zapatero. Instead, his government learned of its non-hero status in cash-conscious EU give-and-take, and seemed at least to some to fall over itself in haste to get out of Iraq before the United Nations might complicate its cover story for not staying.

Interestingly, it fell to the Vatican to point out first in Europe one of the troubling things about Zapatero's withdrawal. While Germany, which clearly did not approve, chose the coldness of declining to speak to the issue at all, Renato Cardinal Martino, president of the peace council, commented, "The new Spanish government is trying to keep its electoral promises, but there's a time for fulfilling them."

No stooge of the Americans, having accused them of humiliating treatment of Saddam Hussein after his capture, the cardinal insisted that leaving Iraq implied abandoning it to civil war, and possibly to an Islamic fundamentalist regime. Then he stuck the needle in. He said, "It isn't wise to rush the United Nations, knowing that it won't assume its responsibilities for the Iraqi situation before June 30."

That appeared to be exactly the Zapatero government's problem. A diplomat who served for four years in Spain said that it appeared the UN Security Council would pass an enabling resolution, that it would get a key role in Iraq, and that Spain saw an onrushing embarrassment in the new circumstances because they resemble those Zapatero set out for his troops to stay on — UN political and security control of Iraq after June 30.

Indeed, Zapatero's pullout announcement came on April 18, a Sunday. Two days before, the UN special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, had unveiled a plan to establish a caretaker government to replace the Iraqi governing council. ...

Although they are no longer talking the same language, Kerry and Zapatero appeared to get snarled in the same predicament: George W. Bush's new willingness to offload large parts of the United States' burdens to the United Nations.

For Kerry, this pre-empted a chunk of his argument that the best means for America to deal with Iraq is through internationalization. For Zapatero, it forced him to keep an election pledge in a way that raised questions about how acute Good Spain's sense of responsibility was going to be as an international grown-up.

As for the Bush Administration, according to another diplomat, it told Zapatero's foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, that the decision to withdraw was a blunder. The language actually may have been harsher. In a dispatch from Washington on Sunday, Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger, foreign editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote that congressmen he spoke to last week regarded Zapatero as a modern day Neville Chamberlain.

Zapatero, you silly afrancesado. Don't you realize that the reward for being in the ranks of the just is exactly that? Being in the ranks of the just.

There is no reward for following Paris and Berlin. Being
el caniche de Chiraque is reward enough in itself! It is reward enough to know that you are as naturally intelligent, as naturally peaceful, as naturallement solidaire, as naturallement lucide, as naturally humanistic, and as naturally filled with wisdom as the French lovers of peace.

“We’ve got to ask young Arabs to extend their hands” to their Iranian counterparts challenging the mullahs, says Bernard Kouchner

Through three months of Arab revolt against autocratic leaders, it’s become commonplace to say that the only clear strategic winner from the changes so far is Iran

writes John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune, as the Islamic Republic is

supposedly picking up windfall political fruit as if sitting in an armchair.

Condensed, the argument goes like this: There has been only profit for Iran from the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, who represented an Arab bulwark against Tehran’s nuclear weapons ambitions and the mullahs’ allies, Hezbollah and Hamas. Conversely, and beyond its hopes for democracy in the Middle East, the United States and some of its Western friends have reaped potential grief in the destabilization their old regional power relationships.

On the ides of March 2011, that assessment appears incomplete and almost mild. Rather, there’s a developing sense of foreboding.

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi has increasingly real chances of putting down the rebellion against him in Libya. Before his boss could try to paper over what he said last week, James R. Clapper Jr., President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, testified before Congress that the dictator’s forces “will prevail” in the long term.

Apart from twisting the neck of the theories of inexorable popular rage certain to engulf all the region’s tyrants (Just you wait, Tehran!), this shard of very possible truth places the West’s hesitant, stuttering position on Libya parallel to its halting response to the threat of Iranian nukes — and reassures Iran’s leaders of their wisdom in moving to crush their own protesters.

A second naïve premise is also collapsing.

It was the Pollyanna-ish (and calming) assumption of some analysts that while pocketing the disarray from the Arab upheaval, Iran was too clever to meddle in creating more of it. Now, for the first time, we’re told this isn’t so.

… [The] account of active Iranian troublemaking in Bahrain, a country of basic strategic importance to America, is significant. Add to that a surge of new notions of Western impotence — plus an emboldened Iran — if the Libyan colonel prevails.

And this: Last month, Britain provided a new urgency in the assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons timetable. Defense Minister Liam Fox has said “it is entirely possible” that Iran could produce a nuke in 2012.

So what to do? No decisive response on Iran, the ultimate Middle Eastern issue, is coming from Western capitals.

Their lack of focus on it, their nervousness about linking the Arab revolts with Iran through urging young Arab democracies to back Iran’s protest movement, is striking.

…This generalized timidity is not escaping attention. Bernard Kouchner, the former French foreign minister, put his finger on it in a conversation last week.

He said, “We’ve got to ask young Arabs to extend their hands” to their Iranian counterparts challenging the mullahs. “The French government should propose it. The question of Iran and the Arab revolt has not been joined as one.”

… Senator John Kyl … accused the administration of failing to go beyond “the first grade” level in assisting the Iranian opposition in the manner the United States had helped Poland’s Solidarity protesters in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Raising Warning Flags: This Time, the Hawks Are French

As Russia thanks the Obama administration for its reset button and for its abandoning Central Europe's missile shield by… refusing to go along with sanctions against Iran, John Vinocur jumps in with an article entitled This Time, the Hawks Are French.

When a country gets certified as a Multilateral Good Guy as the United States did last week, thanks to the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, one of the obligations that comes with the designation is listening seriously to warnings from less powerful partners.

Against the background of America’s recent past, these circumstances would ordinarily mean the United States hearing about its insufficient nuance, inadequate patience, and fatal reliance on force. Hand on throat, or finger to trigger — that’s not the way to do it, the classic admonition went.

Prepped and practiced, the Yanks could comfortably answer these days (even to applause), we’ve understood.

But there’s something that’s not clear: how this America reacts now when it’s told it’s behaving weakly, indecisively, or perhaps deceptively in inadequately trying to stop Iran’s rush toward a nuclear weapon.

… Their warnings can be blunt: that the United Sates is playing a flabby, losing game against Iran … Could Mr. Obama be well served by explaining more clearly why people should have faith in him on these issues which, at least at the leadership level of this country, are dead serious matters of concern?

John Rosenthal adds:

Back in the day, the mainstream news media used to revel in the political misfortunes of the European leaders that had supported George W. Bush and “his” Iraq war. The depiction of their downfalls constituted a veritable morality play. Think José María Aznar, Silvio Berlusconi, and Tony Blair.

… Never mind the facts. The grand narrative of the European masses rising up against the “deeply unpopular” Iraq war dictated that the (supposed) difficulties of the Bush allies had to be the story.

If Aznar, Berlusconi, and Blair were the villains in this narrative — traitors to the law-abiding, peace-loving European cause — the heroes also came in three: German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the dynamic French duo of President Jacques Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. Oddly enough, however, when these leading lights of the Franco-German “axis of peace” themselves went down to defeat or bowed out without a fight as their electoral prospects dimmed, this was not a story.

… one comes to a startling realization. Some six and a half years after the start of the Iraq war, continental Europe’s three largest and most powerful countries are all led by politicians who more or less openly supported the war and/or severely criticized the Franco-German efforts to prevent it.

By a bizarre historical irony, however, the politics of the “axis of peace” continue to lead a sort of shadow existence in Washington — in the person of Barack Obama. … notwithstanding the Nobel committee’s condescending pat on the back for their disciple, Obama’s European role models are all gone. He is on his own now and should his pursuit of “peaceful dialogue” give rise to a nuclear Iran and threats of greater and more terrible wars, this will be his responsibility.

The French Way of Caricaturing American Policies and Positions

While some French readers have made smug comments about French courage versus American treachery (plus ça change…), it turns out that both George W Bush and Condi Rice spoke up about the crisis, albeit belatedly, in ways that no French leader has.

Indeed, according to the Transatlantic Intelligencer, this (the Gallic self-praise versus Yankee damnation that leads to that type of smug comments) is only French society's and the French media's usual way of doing business:

Note that the French press is making much of the fact that a State Department spokesperson, Justin Higgins, is supposed to have made similar “freedom, but” remarks, even going so far as to describe the cartoons as “incitation to religious and ethnic hatred” – an assessment, incidentally, that none of us can either confirm or reject without precisely seeing them. These alleged remarks by Mr. Higgins – similar remarks are attributed in an AP story to State Department spokesperson Janelle Hironimus – have been stylized by both Le Figaro and Le Nouvel Observateur into the official position of the United States as such. (Thus Le Nouvel Obs: “The United States has condemned the publication of the controversial caricatures… as an ‘unacceptable’ incitation to religious or ethnic hatred.”)

Pointing out that Justin Higgins is just one press officer among (many) others, John Rosenthal notes how un-English the words attributed to the entire State Department, to the entire U.S. government, to the entire American nation sound.

Indeed, if anyone should be attacked for cowardice or treachery, it should be the EU…

In addition, the cowardly Bush has not set aside his trip to Pakistan and thanks to John Vinocur and Dan Bilefsky, we know that Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen has set the blame squarely where it belongs:

Rasmussen argued that the cartoon crisis had been hijacked by Middle East countries that were using the caricatures for domestic ends … the crisis … was more about attempts by Iran and Syria to cause diversions in the Middle East than 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. … "I have never doubted that Bush would stand up for Denmark," Rasmussen said. "He values faithfulness and loyalty. I was not surprised he decided to call me and express support."

Update: The French have produced some rather well-argumented defences of free speech, coupled with denunciations of Muslim double standards. Unfortunately, the anti-Americanism is never far away.

A French Imam defends Denmark while taking a dig at the United States. In Oliver Roy's piece, you can also read the digs at Uncle Sam between the lines, notably where he bewails Europe's having to take responsability in Afghanistan, etc.

Meanwhile, Le Monde's Francis Cornu celebrates Al Jazeera, while Alain Salles suggests that reviews that aren't favorable to BHL's American Vertigo must be lacking in seriousness and lets BHL's assertion that someone who doesn't like his book can be nothing but a French-hating populist stand.