Europe to Kerry: Help is not on the
way By Bruno Giussani
As the
series of US presidential debates starts off in Florida,
it is easy to guess what the candidates will say about
Iraq. President George W Bush will repeat that things
there "are going in the right direction" and reiterate
his intention to "stay the course". Democratic opponent
John Kerry will describe the situation as a "crisis of
historic proportions" and point to his four-point plan,
outlined in a speech last week at New York University
(NYU), to turn things around. The first point has now
made it into his television ads as a four-word sound
bite: "Allies share the burden."
I am in doubt
about the exact meaning that Senator Kerry gives to the
word "allies". He may well be thinking of Russia or
Pakistan; but if, as I suspect, he means Europe, well,
here is another four-word sound bite: "That will not
happen."
True: as recent surveys have shown, if
Europe could vote in November Kerry would be elected in
a landslide (see World votes for
Kerry in a landslide, September 10). American
travelers to Europe these days can expect to be asked
time and again, in a hopeful tone, whether Kerry is
going to win come November. Earlier in the campaign, the
Democratic candidate himself contended that foreign
leaders privately favor him over President Bush: an
admittedly clumsy claim, not backed up by names, that
nonetheless wasn't wrong.
Not since the 1960s
has a US presidential contest stirred such passions,
hopes and fears across Europe. Most Europeans feel that
they have much at stake in the November election; that
its outcome will also determine the shape of their
future. Citizens and elites alike are broadly convinced
that a change of leadership in the White House is
necessary not only to modify the terms of the
Euro-American relationship (which are abysmal) but also
for the future of the world's governance.
In
designing his foreign-policy plans, however, Kerry may
be counting on that European sympathy a bit too much.
Let's recap a few of his recent statements.
During his speech at the Democratic National
Convention in Boston on July 29, he said he knows what
to do in Iraq: "We need a president who has the
credibility to bring our allies to our side and share
the burden, reduce the cost to American taxpayers, and
reduce the risk to American soldiers." And he made the
crowd recite with him the mantra: "Help is on the way."
A few days later, on August 3, he got more
specific in an interview with the Los Angeles Times,
saying that he thinks he could attract enough
international help in Iraq to make it a "reasonable"
goal to replace most of the 140,000 US troops currently
stationed there with foreign forces within a first term
as president.
On August 9, talking with
reporters during a campaign stop in Arizona, he upped
his commitment by saying that his goal as president
would be to reduce US troop levels in Iraq during his
first six months in office - that is, by August 2005. "I
believe if you do the kind of alliance-building that is
available to us that it is appropriate to have a goal of
reducing our troops over that period of time," he said.
On September 1, while addressing members of the
American Legion convened in Nashville, Tennessee, he
repeated almost word for word the lines from his Boston
speech.
And on September 20, in that speech at
NYU, he encapsulated his plan in the following words:
"The principles that should guide American policy in
Iraq now and in the future are clear: We must make Iraq
the world's responsibility, because the world has a
stake in the outcome and others should share the
burden."
From a European perspective, this is
funny talk, particularly from a man who knows Europe
well and who, by the admission of his own advisers, has
not so far held any discussions with foreign leaders
about committing more troops. Kerry is promising
something whose likelihood is very close to zero. Help
is not on the way for Iraq. Europe will not rush to
"share the burden", nor to reduce significantly the cost
of the Mesopotamian adventure to American taxpayers.
Truth is, the United States will have to see Iraq
through mostly by itself.
On one matter, Kerry
is right: It is undoubtedly in everyone's interest to
encourage some form of democratic stability in Iraq and
to prevent it from becoming a failed state. But European
politicians are not suicidal and that won't change even
if John Kerry is elected.
A reminder: on March
15 the citizens of Spain voted out prime minister Jose
Maria Aznar. He had supported the war despite
overwhelming domestic opposition and had then, for
political convenience, tried to manipulate the
significance of the terrorist attacks that hit Madrid
four days before the voting took place (191 were killed,
1,800 wounded). Even though, in the US political
narrative, the Spanish vote was translated as
"surrendering to the terrorists", the ousting of Aznar
was a textbook example of a healthy democracy at work.
It was also a powerful reminder of just how
widespread public rejection of the war in Iraq is, not
just in Spain but in Europe as a whole. (I know that
"Europe" is a simplification of a complex reality, but
bear with me.) Despite sympathy for American and British
soldiers serving in the Middle East and for their
families, a vast majority of Europeans consider the war
in Iraq not only unnecessary and unjustified, but
manufactured by the Bush administration for its own
ends.
European politicians have continued to put
on polite faces but public opinion, particularly in
France and Germany, countries that could make a
difference, is vehemently against the idea of sending
troops to Iraq or offering any other kind of significant
direct help to "clean up Bush's mess" - a sentiment I
heard again and again during my two trips to Europe this
summer. Those countries already engaged in Iraq (notably
Italy and Poland, along with Britain, which is a special
case) will probably remain there, at least for the time
being, despite growing public discontent: Their
governments have no interest in opening a rift with the
US and feel, in any case, that they can't afford to
contradict their own positions domestically. However,
they are unlikely to step up their efforts.
Other European countries seem open to providing
modest support, such as offering to relieve some of
Iraq's debts (though why exactly Iraq should be given
priority over poorer countries on this matter has never
been adequately explained by US officials). Limited
developmental and reconstruction aid or aid in training
future Iraqi police and technocrats are also
possibilities. But no country is eager to send soldiers.
A vast engagement of European forces under the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) flag also
looks improbable - at least without a serious US
commitment to real partnership in the development of the
alliance. Even Kerry's recent suggestion that a United
Nations high commissioner might be appointed to oversee
reconstruction and elections wouldn't modify the
situation significantly, unless the commissioner's
mandate included command over US troops in Iraq -
something that goes well beyond what even Kerry seems
willing to concede.
This is not to say that as
president Kerry wouldn't enjoy significant leverage with
his European peers. Europeans have not forgotten
September 11, 2001. They agree that terrorism is a very
serious threat; they've suffered from it for decades and
understand it better than most. However, Europeans
strongly disagree with the whole notion that invading
Iraq was a necessary step in fighting terrorism. They
believe, as do a growing number of Americans, that the
focus on Iraq and on its delusional dictator has been a
severe distraction from the very real dangers that have
arisen from the debris of the Cold War: network-based
catastrophic terrorism, nuclear and biological weapons
proliferation, and the failure of global governance.
To "bring the allies to our side", Kerry will
have to take the bold step of explicitly and
categorically uncoupling the war in Iraq from the wider
fight against terrorism. On this premise, there will be
plenty of support and help available from Europe for
reconstructing Afghanistan, tracking down Osama bin
Laden, sharing intelligence, disrupting terrorist
financing networks and blocking their assets,
identifying and neutralizing sleeper cells, stopping the
spread of weapons of mass destruction, dealing with
rogue states, devising a real(istic) path to peace for
Palestine, supporting moderate Islamic governments and
organizations with democratic leanings, securing global
networks and transportation systems, and so much more.
The sympathy for Kerry in Europe relies neither
on his fluency in French nor on the boarding-school year
that he spent in Switzerland, although these are pluses.
Nor are Europeans naive to the point of believing that a
Kerry administration would steer the United States in a
fundamentally different direction on matters of security
and foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East: the
differences between the two presidential contenders are
mostly in the nuances. But Kerry is perceived as having
a more multilateral and pragmatic approach that favors
consensus-building over threats and empiricism over
ideology, and his election might at least make a
dialogue between ever more estranged friends possible
again.
A Bush second term, on the other hand,
would probably make the current trans-Atlantic gap a
permanent feature of the global system, with
unpredictable consequences for that system's stability.
Bush is almost universally despised in Europe (as in
most of the rest of the world). In polls, less than one
out of 10 Europeans rates him positively. His
administration's arrogant "with us or against us"
attitude has alienated significant numbers of genuine
friends of the United States, who have turned
suspicious, if not outright hostile. Many can't fathom
how a majority of American voters could even consider
re-electing him, a feeling that is creating a curious
state of suspension in Europe. Many prefer to imagine
that the past three years have been but an anomaly in
history that will end on November 2; after which, with a
new tenant in the Oval Office, normalcy in international
relations will resume.
Let's be clear: most
Europeans believe that the United States is a force for
good in the world and they can differentiate between a
people and the policies of its government. Most of the
current aversion focuses in remarkably personal terms on
President Bush and his inner circle. A change in
administrations could therefore by itself ignite renewed
trans-Atlantic cooperation. It would certainly yield a
general sigh of relief in Europe and simultaneously,
without Bush as a collective excuse for inaction, it
might force Europeans to get their act together and take
the global responsibilities of the "old continent" more
seriously.
But none of this should be mistaken
for a blank check for a future Kerry presidency, nor for
a commitment of more European boots on the ground in and
around places like Fallujah and Samarra. By now, in many
respects, Iraq is, as journalist James Fallows termed
it, the 51st state of the United States, and Europeans
have no desire to interfere in the "domestic affairs" of
an ally. For the rest of the world's troubles, here is
the European four-word sound bite for Kerry: "John, let
us talk."
Bruno Giussani is a Swiss
writer, a 2004 Knight Fellow at Stanford University and
an Affiliated Fellow at the Stanford Institute for
International Studies. His work has appeared on the New
York Times' website, in the European editions of Time
and of the Wall Street Journal, and other European and
American venues. He can be reached atwww.giussani.com/contact. This
article appeared previously onTomdispatchand is posted
here by permission.
