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Sunday, May 09, 2004Non-baseball: Continental DriftNote: This post originally appeared on my political blog. I have archived it here for posterity's sake. I want to point you to a great article by Robert J. Samuelson about how the US and EU seem to be drifting apart. I was most interested by how Europeans view the president. He notes that much of the anti-Bush sentiment in Europe stems from two misconceptions. "One view is that Bush went into Iraq for oil. About 60 percent of the French and Germans believe that, says Pew. Another view is that U.S. foreign policy has fallen hostage to Bush's religious fervor. Militarism becomes a heavenly mission."The "oil grab" is obviously the one you hear most often, and is just about the least-informed argument against the war. My thinking is- doesn't it have to happen once? Don't we actually have to steal oil before we can be accused of it? Think about all the times that the United States had the chance to turn oil-rich middle-eastern nations into the 51st state. Yet it's never happened. Not once have we held these nations at ransom in return for oil. We pay just like everyone else. The second point is what really scares me. It shows how uninformed Europeans are when it comes to the United States. To claim that Bush is some sort of religious extremist is laughable. He's a devout Christian, but he's never been overtly so. Sure, he's used a few lines in speeches that were religious in nature and a portion of his early domestic policy was faith-based, but he's never been an extremist in any sense of the word. This quote illustrates the point: "We've been much more used to a distinction between the state and God," says John Palmer of the European Policy Centre, a Brussels think tank. It's "deeply worrying ... for the major superpower to be deriving its strategy from fundamentalism."First off the line about being "used to a distinction between the state and God" is asinine. I don't need to tell you that separation of church and state has always been a cornerstone of the American system and was co-opted from the Constitution by many European states. Makes you wonder about what kind of think-tank this guy is at. Maybe he's just the janitor or something. If this is representative of so-called "informed" European opinion toward the US, we could have some problems. This is the cause of much of the strain on our relationship. I've said many times: Go ahead and hate the war and hate Bush- but hate him for a good reason. It seems that Europe doesn't have a good reason. |
