From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
Comic Relief
France liberates Poland from the grip of mockery.
The governments of France and Germany started this bonfire of accusation and recrimination, now they can stand in it. All that remains is for Sherry-Lehmann, Morrell or some other elegant Manhattan wine seller to gather us into a party to pour out bottles of Haut-Brion into the East River. Polish-Americans probably thought they wouldn't live long enough to hear the end of Polish jokes, but France has liberated Poland from the grip of mockery.
Ah well, we are living through the nervous age of Code Orange, going to work every day in cities under constant threat from homicidal Muslims, so who's to complain if the French wish to volunteer for the war effort by providing comic relief. It didn't have to be this way. One would have thought that after Gerhard Schröder had used George Bush to get himself re-elected and Jacques Chirac had dragged the American president through the humiliation of asking permission from the same United Nations that put Colonel Qaddafi in charge of global human-rights, they'd both cash in their chips and go home to watch the war on CNN.
But no, politicians always think that winning one round means they've won the world, and so we got still more lectures about the perils of war from the foreign ministers of Germany and France. This from men who surely believe that Mr. Bush lacks irony. So naturally the satirists descended.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page entered early with Christopher Hitchens' difficult-to-top "The Rat That Roared." As sometimes happens in our time, the best effort of all emerged anonymously from the vapors of the Internet, this time as a history, in 18 succinct paragraphs, of French military prowess.
"Wars of Religion--France goes 0-5-4 against the Huguenots."
"French Revolution--Won, primarily due the fact that the opponent was also French."
"Algerian rebellion--Lost. First time an Arab army has beaten a Western army since the Crusades."
"War on Terrorism--Lost. Jacques Chirac surrenders to five million illegal immigrants from Algeria."
Low blows? Unfair? Untrue? So what? You live by the media and die by the media nowadays, and Messrs. Chirac and Schröder rode a wave of anti-war media adulation as long as it lasted. It broke when the leaders of eight European nations published an Op-ed in The Wall Street Journal making it clear that these two didn't constitute "Europe." Within days, 10 more national leaders from the delightfully named Vilnius Group, who learned their politics as foot stools of the Soviet Union, separated themselves from France and Germany. A commitment of troops came from the prime minister of Slovakia, a nation whose old-immigrant population in America is huge. Ask the Chicago Bears.
But the damage was done.
Before September 11, the U.S.-European relationship was stiff. Mainly this has to do with the distance that now separates one economic and military superpower from European nations that chose the flatlands of socialism after the War, and gradually lost momentum and political power. U.S. and European officials now bicker--and the disagreements are not insignificant--over trans-national business mergers, intellectual property rights, agricultural disputes and similar stress-points in an economically borderless world.
Now, in recent weeks, what had been a difficult but manageable relationship between policy elites was driven into the streets, where inevitably the quality of debate becomes: "Bomb Texas, They've Oil Too."
The reasons mount daily for the Bush administration to get this Iraq operation behind them, but not least is the whipped-up bitterness that is developing between the populations of America and Europe. Only 18 months ago, it was all in the opposite direction. From spring through fall in New York City before September 11, we got used to hearing passing clouds of German, Dutch, Spanish and Italian, as young visitors streamed through the city's museums and downtown galleries, clubs and restaurants (in December, their parents would fly over to shop uptown). That fresh and healthy trans-Atlantic curiosity, which traveled in both directions, died down in the ashes of the World Trade Center and a flat economy, not because of anything the U.S. did to recivilize Afghanistan or smother other terrorists in their chosen playpens, such as Germany.
This large and dangerous initiative, with the unprecedented element of biological weapons, was certain to cause debate and opposition. But what has happened since to the U.S.-European "relationship" strikes me as a perfect case study in modern opinion-formation, or malformation--proving how sophisticated cultures are rendered dumb by media.
Anyone half-awake recalls how after two men, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, decided to overplay their hand on the U.N.-sanctioned inspections in Iraq, newspapers and TV, led by a New York Times that seems to have decided to remake itself as Col. McCormick's Chicago Tribune, instructed us that "Europe" was separating itself from the U.S. Increasingly grandiose statements from French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin and Germany's Joschka Fischer ("My generation learned you must make a case, and excuse me, I am not convinced") were amplified as spoken for "the Europeans," and reporters claimed support for that view by quoting individuals ranting at Tony Blair on a British TV show.
We have entered an age of media issues-compression, which insists that this sort of information fog--the combined thoughts of Jacques Chirac, randomly quoted Germans, an audience of left-wing nuts on British TV and of course some opinion polls--represents the views of entire peoples, the "Europeans." In normal times, modern politicians can be driven off their stands by this media maelstrom. But we knew quite a bit about Saddam before the fog blew in, and from what one reads, it appears that this time one president and 18 other elected leaders in Europe aren't going to be pushed off course.
(Editor's note: The author of the summary of French military history quoted above has stepped forward. It is blogger Silflay Hraka, and it's available in full here.)
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
