"...let's find Osama bin Laden, together. If alive, he is certainly not in Baghdad," Michael Naumann, former German Minister of Culture and editor of Die Zeit, writes in a NY Times op-ed piece. Why Europe Is Wary of War in Iraq:
"...While American patriotism proudly celebrates its armed forces' power and victories, Europe's diverse loyalties and identities are formed by a war-weary pessimism thoroughly grounded in our history: Wars can be just, certainly those fought in self- defense can; but they can be bloody useless, too. This pessimism may shade, potentially, into appeasement, yet its roots are real. They explain European reluctance to intervene quickly in Bosnia — a deplorable reluctance, in hindsight — and the present refusal to join arms with the United States against Iraq.However, what this argument does not explain is why the US after Vietnam should not be as war-weary and -wary as Europe. A European FmH reader wrote to suggest that this is because wars have been fought on European but not US soil; could that really be the difference, when most of the living European adult population is as remote in time from the last pan-European ground war in 1945 as the US is in space. I'm convinced one has to turn instead to temperamental differences. The cowboy strain in American psychology -- both rugged individualism and cocky adventurism -- born of having had a frontier to push against for most of our history, has been an important difference, especially when the yahoos off the ranch are the same people managing the interests of Big Oil.
This time, however, the powder keg is not the Balkans but the highly armed, explosive Mideast. Too many guns are drawn, too many fingers are on the triggers, and some of them could be on nuclear bombs. This should be the hour of forceful diplomacy, not to be mistaken for appeasement.
The distance between Europe's leaders and the Bush administration continues to grow. The existence of a new threat — global terrorism — is undisputed. But Washington's unilateralism, from here, looks like simply a form of America's longstanding isolationism, which is to say that the distance is created by America, not by Europe. Perhaps North Atlantic Treaty Organization members should not whine so much about being left out of Pentagon planning sessions. But the United States might benefit from recalling the late Senator J. William Fulbright's diatribes against "arrogance of power." Europe's liberal and conservative pundits already are."
Indeed, European warnings about the rift in the Atlantic alliance that would be caused by an attack on Iraq don't seem to give Dubya pause. Neither does criticism of an Afghan-style intervention by even a key Iraqi resistance leader, reports the Christian Science Monitor. In fact, 'President Bush and his top aides now seem to welcome, even to egg on, the sharp differences prompted by Mr. Bush's determination to expand his battle against what he calls "evil" regimes', suggested yesterday's New York Times. Bush relishes his dark, struggle-against-evil worldview, says this Washington Post foreign policy analyst who found that Bush had picked the brains of grim foreign correspondent Robert Kaplan months before 9-11.
'Many Republicans criticized the Clinton administration for entering peacekeeping operations without having an exit strategy. It's ironic, perhaps, that this administration seems to be waging war without any exit strategy other than moving to the next battlefield. The war could become, as in the Orwell novel 1984, a permanent state of being. "War is Peace," the Ministry of Truth slogan read in the novel.The administration jackasses are so enamored of their grandiose anti-axis-of-evil mission that a set of new campaign ads will suggest, in essence, that supporting Democrats aids the terrorists. ABC via MetaFilter
Or, as Kaplan has argued, war becomes a condition no longer distinctly separate from peace. Bush has embraced that view, at least for now. As he declared in his State of Union address, "I will not wait on events, while dangers gather." He has seen a grim landscape, to paraphrase Kaplan, and seems determined to confront it.'
Meanwhile, David Corn asks in The Nation, US mis-strikes: mistakes or war crimes?
That's a provocative question, the sort of query that few, if any, reporters at the Pentagon briefing room are going to toss at Rummy. Nevertheless, it's a question that may bear consideration as new details emerge about the latest US mis-strikes.
Over the past week, two US military operations originally touted as successes have turned into PR nightmares for the Defense Department and the CIA First, the Pentagon had to acknowledge (sort of) that a January 24 commando raid that attacked two small compounds in Hazar Qadam--resulting in the deaths of 21 or so Afghans and the capture of 27 others--had been a mistake. Those people killed or grabbed were not, as the Pentagon first announced, Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters, but troops and local officials loyal to the current government. Then The Washington Post reported on Monday that the three men killed on February 4 in the remote village of Zhawar by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone were not Al Qaeda leaders, as the Pentagon had suggested. They were Afghan peasants foraging for scrap metal, and the group did not include Osama bin Laden. Media reports following the attack raised the possibility the Al Qaeda chief had been one of the dead.
Corn and others in the progressive/alternative press have, of course, been raising such questions all along. But now the mainstream press, as well, is revisiting 'collateral damage' as war coverage takes a negative turn, reports the Washington Post
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