ZGram - 8/31/2002 - "In Europe, the mood is one of disarray and dismay regarding Iraq"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram -Where Truth is Destiny

8/31/2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

For your weekend reading:  A Brussels dispatch!

[START]

Europe unites in doubt

Iraq is rising to the top of the EU's agenda, writes Ian Black, but 
the mood is one of disarray and dismay

Friday August 30, 2002

It's a long way from Brussels to Baghdad, but echoes of the gathering 
crisis over America's determination to bring down Saddam Hussein are 
being heard ever more loudly these days in the capital of Europe.

With the long summer break barely over, Iraq is rapidly rising to the 
top of the EU's agenda. It was set to dominate yesterday's informal 
meeting of foreign ministers in the Danish town of Elsinore, home to 
Shakespeare's doubting hero Hamlet - and a strikingly appropriate 
venue since governments have so little idea what to do.

The European Commission, the union's supranational executive, had 
only a terse "no comment" to offer the other day when Dick Cheney, 
the US vice-president, set out the case for war and attacked critics 
for "willful blindness."

Not for the first time, Europe does not look like being more than the 
sum of its parts. None of the EU's 15 member states want to see 
George Bush launch a new war in the Gulf. But there is a mounting 
sense that they may simply be powerless to stop it at a time when 
America seems brutally insensitive to their concerns.

The mood is one of disarray and dismay. Rarely have the terms of the 
transatlantic debate - crudely summarised as wimps versus warriors, 
law-based multilateralism versus the raw military might of the 
world's only superpower - been so acrimonious.

The genuine soldarity expressed by Europeans after the September 11 
attacks last year seems a thing of the distant past. Unease over 
Afghanistan has given way to deep anxiety about Iraq.

Europeans, sticklers for international law, agree that Saddam Hussein 
must comply with long-standing UN resolutions and allow weapons 
inspectors - expelled in 1998 - to return to finish the job of 
checking on his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Most also 
insist that they would need to see hard intelligence evidence of 
those capabilities before considering whether multilateral military 
action was justified. None would contemplate it without a clear 
mandate from the UN security council - the world's "top table," where 
both France and Britain still wield vetoes.

None accept that there is any proven link between Iraq and Osama Bin 
Laden's al-Qaeda terrorists, let alone a "smoking gun" in downtown 
Baghdad. Washington's increasingly strident talk of "regime change" 
is anathema to the old continent for both pragmatic and more 
high-principled reasons.

What guarantee is there that it would succeed, or that a heavily 
moustachoied general fronting for the quarrelsome Iraqi opposition 
would be anything more than a clone of Saddam? What if the country 
broke up into its constituent Kurdish, Shia and Sunni parts - a real 
fear for both neighbouring Turkey and Iran? What about the effect on 
the international oil market and the world economy?

Nor do any EU members accept the emerging US doctrine of pre-emption 
- attacking in order to stop something that has not yet taken place. 
Few agree that there is a real parallel between the Bush 
administration and Winston Churchill, railing in the wilderness 
against the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s.

Beyond Iraq itself, EU governments believe it is mad to target Saddam 
without adopting a far more robust aproach to the Middle East's other 
great conflict - that between Israel and the Palestinians, though 
there is very little chance of any success taken the current grim and 
violent impasse.

Bush's closest European ally, Britain's Tony Blair, has been feeling 
the heat badly in the last few days, with increasingly public 
complaints that his ally in the White House has left him high and 
dry. Guardian polling showed a worrying 52 per cent of Labour 
supporters would not back a war. With the party conference season 
soon under way, that cannot be simply ignored.

And in Belgium, the most instinctively anti-American member of the 
EU, the outspoken foreign minister, Louis "the lip" Michel, attacked 
the man in Downing Street for "submissively" following the White 
House lead on Iraq and weakening Europe's chances of being a 
significant global player. Belgium's position matters not so much for 
its own sake but because it is likely to be a focus for other EU 
members worried by the apparently unstoppable drift to war.

Big countries matter much more: Jacques Chirac, the French president, 
sounded a firm note of opposition, slamming attempts "to legitimise 
the use of unilateral and preemptive use of force". Those veiled but 
unambiguous words from the Elysee appeared to reverse a recent marked 
change in French policy - trying to sound less anti-American since 
the victory of the centre right in the summer general election.

German opposition may be even more important. Gerhard Schroeder, the 
chancellor, has made opposition to a new war in Iraq a central plank 
of his election campaign. Now his conservative challenger Edmund 
Stoiber has followed suit, apparently in response to Dick Cheney's 
"pre-emption" speech. "The monopoly on the decision and action in 
this question lies with the United Nations," the Bavarian warned. 
"Unilateral moves on this question by a nation, without the 
consultation or mandate of the international community, are not 
compatible with that."

Elsewhere on the continent, close attention will be paid in the 
coming days to views in Madrid and Rome, where fellow conservatives 
Jose Maria Aznar and Silvio Berlusconi are considered instinctively 
pro-American but still unlikely to break ranks with the broad EU 
consensus. Non-Nato EU neutrals Sweden, Austria, Finland and Ireland 
will come down firmly on the dovish side of any argument.

European leaders have no easy answers. But with few choices 
available, their best tactic will be to press Iraq harder than they 
have yet done to accept the UN inspectors - ignoring America's 
hardening view that their "toothless" work will not prevent war. Jack 
Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, did exactly that this week - 
saying that this insistent demand was "putting the ball back in 
Saddam Hussein's court."

 From Athens to Lisbon, Berlin to Paris and Rome to Stockholm, EU 
governments are hoping the Iraqi leader will indeed pick it up. For 
if he does not, as Belgium's Michel admitted ruefully but 
realistically, "Europe will find it very difficult to remain squarely 
opposed to an American preventive strike."

[END]

Email
ian.black@guardian.co.uk

(Source: 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,783654,00.html 
)

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