I'll probably be blogging on a lighter schedule than usual the next few days. But at the moment, I'll refer to this post by Josh Marshall, who has a pretty good take on how Europeans tend to view the Iraq War:
(One heartening, encouraging sign in today's papers comes from the Wall Street Journal, which reports that "Germany -- which helped thwart Washington's pursuit of a United Nations Security Council endorsement for the invasion -- privately has asked Spain's likely new leadership to tone down its anti-U.S. rhetoric." This is precisely the sort of drawing back from the brink -- and distinguishing rather than conflating these different issues -- that we need right now on all sides.)
If there is anything good that can come out of this Spanish tragedy, and it certainly looks like close to wall to wall bad, it is that it may force us to shake the attitude of denial that we're in about the nature of our coalition. A couple of the columns above are right to talk about the increasing danger this all poses to the Atlantic alliance.
But the truth is that we've just been fooling ourselves with all this mumbojumbo about New Europe and whatever Spain had meant, up to this point, about Western unity. The idea that there was a hawkish, pro-American, anti-dirigiste New Europe that we were allying ourselves with against Old Europe (i.e., Germany and France) was never more than a fantasy or a farce.
There was some variation in attitudes toward our policies in Iraq across the continent -- most notably in Poland. And support was somewhat higher in some countries in the post-Communist east. But by and large popular opposition to our policies was close to overwhelming from one end of the continent to the other.
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