More on Munich (The Merry München Munchkins)
I said yesterday that the recent antics of the heirs of Charlemagne – France, Germany, and the Belgians – would be amusing in a dark sort of way, were they not so grim in their consequences. Let us look carefully at what is going on, shall we?
Let us look, first, at the consequences for Frabelgiany itself. The Franco-Belgian-German attempt to assert power will in the end work a final forfeiture of any lingering pretensions to power the three nations possess. They have backed themselves into a corner, and their hollow claims to any captaincy in world affairs will not survive their failure to control events now – if in fact they do fail to control them. The only way, however, in which they can succeed in controlling events to their liking is by somehow causing the United States to falter. And this would lead, causally, to even worse straits for these nations, as well as for the world at large. The three cannot possibly afford, literally or metaphorically, to divest themselves of their social welfare systems and other, non-defense-related drains on their treasury; yet if American power, which has long defended them for free, is compromised, not even devoting their entire combined GDP to arms and defense could replace that shield. Moreover, as John McCain, of whom I am not generally a fan, bluntly told them, Americans will remember and resent this recalcitrance for a long time to come. Even a compromised US power would remain many orders of magnitude greater than that that all Europe could achieve in unison; and while no resentments on our part could imaginably motivate us to attack our erstwhile allies, we would certainly, in such straits, have no compunction about leaving them to their fates.
France has for centuries traded, usually cynically, upon the pious myth that they were Our First Ally (in fact, it was the Dutch who first recognized the rebellious colonies). By now, any debts we had to the French for Rochambeau and Lafayette are long paid. (Some will recall the answer of the US Ambassador when a previous French ministry, in a fit of Gallic hauteur, threatened to require the withdrawal of all US troops despite the then-Soviet threat: ‘Does that include all our war dead in your cemeteries?’) We are coming increasingly to the point of saying, ‘Lafayette, we are outta here.’
Germany, in turn, has been an American pet since 1946 or so, our shiny happy example of nation-building, de-Nazification, and democratization. But here especially is US patience running increasingly thin.
And then there is Belgium. Belgium had a very poor image in the West, and in America particularly, until 1914. They were the ones who deserted Wellington in great clumps during the Waterloo campaign. They were tainted with the horrors of the Belgian Congo. It was the Germans who inadvertently saved Belgium, by invading it despite their own guaranty of its neutrality, by sacking Louvain, by shooting civilians and deporting slave-laborers (shades of the WWII camps). Suddenly, the Belgians of Congo infamy became ‘plucky little Belgium,’ and that sentiment survived even their abject capitulation the next time the Germans invaded.
As may be seen in the case of the ChiComs, Americans find it psychologically intolerable to have allies of expediency. When expediency dictates an alliance – as with ‘Kindly Old Uncle Joe’ Stalin, during Hitler’s war – we have to convince ourselves that the ally of convenience is actually Not So Bad, At Heart. We did the same when Dick Nixon went to China. But the ChiComs are fundamentally our enemies, and they at least don’t much bother to pretend otherwise. We in turn are beginning to realize that ourselves, and when we do, there will be a typically American revulsion of feeling. The point is that American sentimentalism about allies is easily created, usually through American self-delusion, but when the ally in question turns on us, it can be rapidly and explosively lost – with consequences that the self-created Axis of Irrelevance is on the verge of learning the hard and bitter way.
But aside from the dire consequences to themselves that these three recusant gummints are invoking, there are deeper issues.
At This Point, We Are Entering Cordell Hull Country
No, seriously. The latest, ahem, ‘mirage’ from Frabelgiany, and all their attempts to stave off any exertion of power by NATO, the Security Council, and the Coalition of the Willing, is truly an exercise in mendacity on such a scale I had not thought there were any free governments in the world capable of it.
I mean, how duplicitous can these double-dealing weasels get?
Item: When, during the Hunnish electoral campaign, a minister in Gerhard the Gutless’s government explicitly compared the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler, she was fired. Disavowed. Disowned. At Munich (Munich, for God’s sake! What, there were no vacancies in Nuremberg?), Joschka the Yammerer implicitly compared POTUS to Hitler and SecState to Goebbels, saying that the Germans had learned from the Nazi experience and the Second World War to adopt policies that might lead to war only on the basis of evidence, not propaganda. Leaving aside the fact that we are drowning in evidence of casi belli, this is a breathtakingly unsubtle suggestion that the United States Government is no more trustworthy than the Third Reich. Perhaps the Germans thought that as long as the slander was implicit rather than explicit, the Big Dumb Americans wouldn’t catch it.
Item: the alleged Franco-German ‘alternative’ plan accepts, as its whole rationale, that Saddam is in material breach of his disarmament obligations, the consequence of which is a suspension of the Gulf I armistice (which Saddam in fact breached before the ink was dry) and his being deposed and his country liberated: all in accordance with a string of resolutions the French helped draft and both countries voted for. Heavens! Is that, can it possibly be, the stench of hypocrisy I scent wafting from the Continent?
Item: when the European Eight (Blair, Havel, & Co) and then the Vilnius Group stated their support for the US position, Greece, France, Germany, and I think Belgium protested in loud, ankle-biting yelps. This was a breach of the principle of consultation and the creation of a rift in NATO, a threat to NATO unanimity and legitimacy. And now? Now that they are breaking ranks and threatening to break up the whole bloody alliance? Well, apparently, it’s different entirely. But maybe I’m ‘simplistic,’ not being a French technocrat.
Item: pandering to their unassimilated, segregated, ghettoized immigrant populations, these governments have accused ‘the American cowboys’ of being xenophobic, anti-Arab, bigoted, anti-Islamic, and all but in the overt pay of The Eternal Jeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww (you have to whine that part like a real Bundist Kluxer to catch the flavor of ‘elite’ European decadence). Having uttered the lie, they opposed Turkey’s integration into Europe on cultural and allegedly ‘Christian’ grounds (I’d be surprised if any of the bastards were regular communicants) – that was their polite way of saying, ‘Good God, Carruthers! We can’t let any bloody wogs into the Club!’ – and have now done their dead-level best to stab Turkey in the back as a fellow member of NATO. (I wrote yesterday that Turkey’s invocation of Article 4 was unprecedented. I was wrong. NATO Article 4 has been invoked once before. In Gulf I. By the Turks. Whom – here’s a shock – the Euroweenie members were trying to screw in precisely this way, even then.)
Item: they have wept copious, crocodilian tears about the suffering civilians of Iraq, and then proposed an inspection regime that neither liberates them nor lifts the sanctions against the de facto government now in place.
They will literally stoop to any infamy and sacrifice anyone – and any concept, honor included – just to shaft the US. With allies such as these, we don’t need enemies: all the more reason to eliminate the enemies.
And to the extent they have any ‘alternative plan’ that’s more detailed than a mere trial balloon, they must necessarily have been beavering away at it even as their diplomats read their canned responses to SecState’s Security Council indictment of Saddam. It’s not just the hypocrisy, people, it’s the wholesale lying.
The fact is that at this point, every word these three rogue governments, and the Greek government, says on this subject is a lie, ‘including “and” and “the.”’
Confronted with near unanimous support by the rest of Europe for the US / HMG position, they accuse us of unilateralism. While pushing NATO to the breaking point and reneging on their own prior UN positions, they whine that we are irresponsible cowboys uninterested in working through multilateral institutions. And on and nauseatingly on it goes. Obviously, a freed, liberated Iraq will have its own decisions to make about trade and concessions and contracts. Obviously, when Iraq is liberated and the books are opened, the recalcitrants in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Moscow, and Beijing, and others as well, will be exposed as having traded with the common enemy even while voting on sanctions. But the baseness and venality of their motives is hardly at issue here, and I leave to others, and to history, to weigh the relative influence of corruption, of cowardice, and of their sheer hatred and envy of the United States and the Anglosphere, that went into their self-destruction.
What I will say is that if they think the American people, HM Government, the rest of the Eight, the Vilnius Group, Turkey, several Gulf states, and free people everywhere are going to allow them to pull this stunt and not make them suffer the consequences … well, as Winston said of an earlier group of thugs who miscalculated, ‘Do they think we are made of sugar candy?’
I said yesterday that the recent antics of the heirs of Charlemagne – France, Germany, and the Belgians – would be amusing in a dark sort of way, were they not so grim in their consequences. Let us look carefully at what is going on, shall we?
Let us look, first, at the consequences for Frabelgiany itself. The Franco-Belgian-German attempt to assert power will in the end work a final forfeiture of any lingering pretensions to power the three nations possess. They have backed themselves into a corner, and their hollow claims to any captaincy in world affairs will not survive their failure to control events now – if in fact they do fail to control them. The only way, however, in which they can succeed in controlling events to their liking is by somehow causing the United States to falter. And this would lead, causally, to even worse straits for these nations, as well as for the world at large. The three cannot possibly afford, literally or metaphorically, to divest themselves of their social welfare systems and other, non-defense-related drains on their treasury; yet if American power, which has long defended them for free, is compromised, not even devoting their entire combined GDP to arms and defense could replace that shield. Moreover, as John McCain, of whom I am not generally a fan, bluntly told them, Americans will remember and resent this recalcitrance for a long time to come. Even a compromised US power would remain many orders of magnitude greater than that that all Europe could achieve in unison; and while no resentments on our part could imaginably motivate us to attack our erstwhile allies, we would certainly, in such straits, have no compunction about leaving them to their fates.
France has for centuries traded, usually cynically, upon the pious myth that they were Our First Ally (in fact, it was the Dutch who first recognized the rebellious colonies). By now, any debts we had to the French for Rochambeau and Lafayette are long paid. (Some will recall the answer of the US Ambassador when a previous French ministry, in a fit of Gallic hauteur, threatened to require the withdrawal of all US troops despite the then-Soviet threat: ‘Does that include all our war dead in your cemeteries?’) We are coming increasingly to the point of saying, ‘Lafayette, we are outta here.’
Germany, in turn, has been an American pet since 1946 or so, our shiny happy example of nation-building, de-Nazification, and democratization. But here especially is US patience running increasingly thin.
And then there is Belgium. Belgium had a very poor image in the West, and in America particularly, until 1914. They were the ones who deserted Wellington in great clumps during the Waterloo campaign. They were tainted with the horrors of the Belgian Congo. It was the Germans who inadvertently saved Belgium, by invading it despite their own guaranty of its neutrality, by sacking Louvain, by shooting civilians and deporting slave-laborers (shades of the WWII camps). Suddenly, the Belgians of Congo infamy became ‘plucky little Belgium,’ and that sentiment survived even their abject capitulation the next time the Germans invaded.
As may be seen in the case of the ChiComs, Americans find it psychologically intolerable to have allies of expediency. When expediency dictates an alliance – as with ‘Kindly Old Uncle Joe’ Stalin, during Hitler’s war – we have to convince ourselves that the ally of convenience is actually Not So Bad, At Heart. We did the same when Dick Nixon went to China. But the ChiComs are fundamentally our enemies, and they at least don’t much bother to pretend otherwise. We in turn are beginning to realize that ourselves, and when we do, there will be a typically American revulsion of feeling. The point is that American sentimentalism about allies is easily created, usually through American self-delusion, but when the ally in question turns on us, it can be rapidly and explosively lost – with consequences that the self-created Axis of Irrelevance is on the verge of learning the hard and bitter way.
But aside from the dire consequences to themselves that these three recusant gummints are invoking, there are deeper issues.
At This Point, We Are Entering Cordell Hull Country
No, seriously. The latest, ahem, ‘mirage’ from Frabelgiany, and all their attempts to stave off any exertion of power by NATO, the Security Council, and the Coalition of the Willing, is truly an exercise in mendacity on such a scale I had not thought there were any free governments in the world capable of it.
I mean, how duplicitous can these double-dealing weasels get?
Item: When, during the Hunnish electoral campaign, a minister in Gerhard the Gutless’s government explicitly compared the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler, she was fired. Disavowed. Disowned. At Munich (Munich, for God’s sake! What, there were no vacancies in Nuremberg?), Joschka the Yammerer implicitly compared POTUS to Hitler and SecState to Goebbels, saying that the Germans had learned from the Nazi experience and the Second World War to adopt policies that might lead to war only on the basis of evidence, not propaganda. Leaving aside the fact that we are drowning in evidence of casi belli, this is a breathtakingly unsubtle suggestion that the United States Government is no more trustworthy than the Third Reich. Perhaps the Germans thought that as long as the slander was implicit rather than explicit, the Big Dumb Americans wouldn’t catch it.
Item: the alleged Franco-German ‘alternative’ plan accepts, as its whole rationale, that Saddam is in material breach of his disarmament obligations, the consequence of which is a suspension of the Gulf I armistice (which Saddam in fact breached before the ink was dry) and his being deposed and his country liberated: all in accordance with a string of resolutions the French helped draft and both countries voted for. Heavens! Is that, can it possibly be, the stench of hypocrisy I scent wafting from the Continent?
Item: when the European Eight (Blair, Havel, & Co) and then the Vilnius Group stated their support for the US position, Greece, France, Germany, and I think Belgium protested in loud, ankle-biting yelps. This was a breach of the principle of consultation and the creation of a rift in NATO, a threat to NATO unanimity and legitimacy. And now? Now that they are breaking ranks and threatening to break up the whole bloody alliance? Well, apparently, it’s different entirely. But maybe I’m ‘simplistic,’ not being a French technocrat.
Item: pandering to their unassimilated, segregated, ghettoized immigrant populations, these governments have accused ‘the American cowboys’ of being xenophobic, anti-Arab, bigoted, anti-Islamic, and all but in the overt pay of The Eternal Jeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww (you have to whine that part like a real Bundist Kluxer to catch the flavor of ‘elite’ European decadence). Having uttered the lie, they opposed Turkey’s integration into Europe on cultural and allegedly ‘Christian’ grounds (I’d be surprised if any of the bastards were regular communicants) – that was their polite way of saying, ‘Good God, Carruthers! We can’t let any bloody wogs into the Club!’ – and have now done their dead-level best to stab Turkey in the back as a fellow member of NATO. (I wrote yesterday that Turkey’s invocation of Article 4 was unprecedented. I was wrong. NATO Article 4 has been invoked once before. In Gulf I. By the Turks. Whom – here’s a shock – the Euroweenie members were trying to screw in precisely this way, even then.)
Item: they have wept copious, crocodilian tears about the suffering civilians of Iraq, and then proposed an inspection regime that neither liberates them nor lifts the sanctions against the de facto government now in place.
They will literally stoop to any infamy and sacrifice anyone – and any concept, honor included – just to shaft the US. With allies such as these, we don’t need enemies: all the more reason to eliminate the enemies.
And to the extent they have any ‘alternative plan’ that’s more detailed than a mere trial balloon, they must necessarily have been beavering away at it even as their diplomats read their canned responses to SecState’s Security Council indictment of Saddam. It’s not just the hypocrisy, people, it’s the wholesale lying.
The fact is that at this point, every word these three rogue governments, and the Greek government, says on this subject is a lie, ‘including “and” and “the.”’
Confronted with near unanimous support by the rest of Europe for the US / HMG position, they accuse us of unilateralism. While pushing NATO to the breaking point and reneging on their own prior UN positions, they whine that we are irresponsible cowboys uninterested in working through multilateral institutions. And on and nauseatingly on it goes. Obviously, a freed, liberated Iraq will have its own decisions to make about trade and concessions and contracts. Obviously, when Iraq is liberated and the books are opened, the recalcitrants in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Moscow, and Beijing, and others as well, will be exposed as having traded with the common enemy even while voting on sanctions. But the baseness and venality of their motives is hardly at issue here, and I leave to others, and to history, to weigh the relative influence of corruption, of cowardice, and of their sheer hatred and envy of the United States and the Anglosphere, that went into their self-destruction.
What I will say is that if they think the American people, HM Government, the rest of the Eight, the Vilnius Group, Turkey, several Gulf states, and free people everywhere are going to allow them to pull this stunt and not make them suffer the consequences … well, as Winston said of an earlier group of thugs who miscalculated, ‘Do they think we are made of sugar candy?’
posted by Markham at 13:34
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