A Norwegian’s Comments on European Perceptions
Here’s an interesting statement about European, specifically Norwegian, perceptions of America during this war. It all leads back to 9/11:
As I see it, 9/11 made Americans realize two things, (as it made me realize them): 1) The Middle East is deeply rotten. 2) Their problems are now our problems. Nothing that has happened since can be understood without these two things in mind – certainly not the willingness of the American people to support a war on Iraq without court-solid evidence that Saddam is a major threat to the world.
Europeans and some Americans haven’t understood this. Fundamentally, the anti-war protests fail to address these two things and propose sound alternatives to military action. I recall signs posted around lower Manhattan in September 2001 arguing that “Your grief is not a cry for war!” This slogans captured the utter failure of those opposed to war in Afghanistan to propose a peaceful alternative to dealing with Al Qaeda, and an utter failure to understand that it was not grief or anger bringing us to war (though grief and anger were not absent from America’s understanding of war), but an acutely perceived and rational need to protect ourselves from anything on the scale of another 9/11.
The reasons for war in Iraq are more abstract. It’s not about a clear and present danger in Saddam Hussein’s arms or the peculiarities of his totalitarian regime. It’s about the aforementioned realization that the Middle East is rotten, and that their problems can no longer be ignored. A good argument for or against this war would have to deal with these issues. Regime change in Iraq is being undertaken as the first step in the grand transformation of the Middle East. Is this attempt at transformation the best way to address the centuries-old political, economic and social failure of the region? I actually believe it is, though this will be a decades long project, comparable to European reconstruction after the Second World War.
It should also be noted that support of the war does not imply support of the Bush Administration. It may be that it required something like the Bush Administration to advocate a fundamentally Wilsonian vision of the world — after all, only Nixon could go to China — but this stridently ideological Administration may be the worst people to run this war. My hope is that a decade or two from now, we can look back at Bush’s diplomatic and political blunders and see them as only minor speedbumps on the road to a liberal, prosperous, stable Middle East.