There is a mystery floating about Europe these days. The
Europeans, especially Western Europeans, seem to think they should
have a say as to who should be President of the United States. At
least that’s the implication one draws from recent newspaper
articles and TV commentary. Leading this recently awakened desire
to direct American political choice are Britain’s so-called
“independent liberal” publications.
In an editorial in the left-leaning newspaper the
Guardian that was also widely distributed over the
Internet, its veteran journalist Jonathan Freeland sounded a sharp warning to the American voter.
“If Americans reject Obama, they will be sending the clearest
possible message to the rest of us [the rest of the world]…that
the world’s esteem is now unwanted.”
The editorial would be of little concern if it didn’t echo the
strident tones of most of the West European media. The question
that comes immediately to mind is what is so valuable in Barack
Obama that Americans should care what Europeans and others
think?
The answer is less in what “the rest of the world” sees in Obama
than what they want for themselves. To begin with, the limited
vision Europeans have of the United States is based on a post-World
War II perception that America came out of the conflict relatively
unscathed. This envy quickly morphed into a perception of the U.S.
buried in apparent opulence, urban violence, and, worst of all,
imperial ambitions. Mirror imaging of its own historical past
became Europe’s method of judging the United States.
IT’S NOT HARD to divine the source of the strong support for Barack
Obama among Europeans. To begin with, West Europe contains most of
the nations with a modern, 17th - 20th century, colonial history.
An American president whose father was an African goes far to
exculpate the guilt felt by the now fashionably anti-colonialist
Europe.
This same Europe does so with no domestic political price to pay
for its convenient liberalism that repeatedly has shown itself to
be absent in recent years when dealing with its own former colonial
immigrants. Europeans certainly have no intention of raising up to
their top leadership ranks the son or daughter of a mixed marriage
of African, or Middle Eastern, or Asian descent. Hypocrisy rules! A
half-Kenyan American president absolves all their lingering
colonial sins.
Beyond the obvious racial guilt, Western Europe’s strong left
and liberal political echelon believes that Obama’s repeated
references to sitting down and talking with one’s opponents is
consistent with their own method of international leverage. Except
that is exactly what has been going on under both the Clinton and
Bush Administrations — until the time when talking became futile
and even counter-productive.
The suggestion that an Obama administration would introduce a
new willingness to negotiate rather than launch military strikes is
ludicrous. There’s nothing new in multi-level, slowly escalating
negotiations, if progress is discerned. This is exactly what the
United States has been pursuing since the end of the First Gulf
War.
Apparently European public opinion has had a memory lapse.
Extensive negotiations preceded the initiation of Coalition
military ground action in Iraq in 2003. Allied air operations
creating a no-fly-zone over north and south Iraq had existed since
the end of 1991 to prevent Saddam’s continued genocide of his own
Shia and Kurdish peoples.
Baghdad had for many years been a principal supporter and
sanctuary for international terrorist activity and had attempted
the assassination of George H.W. Bush visiting the Gulf after the
earlier war. Leaving aside the controversial issue of Saddam’s
efforts to obtain WMD, at the time of the Coalition’s invasion in
2003 there was still unresolved the United Nations inspectors’
specific reference to Saddam’s unaccounted-for hundreds of liters
of anthrax stocks left over from the previous war!
Barack Obama obviously shared the Left’s calculated indifference
to historical fact or perhaps just missed that portion of his
handlers’ foreign policy briefs. In any case, it lined up the
Democrat candidate exactly where the European “liberal” mentality
wanted him.
PERSONAL DISLIKE of George W. Bush is really the strongest factor
in the pro-Obama movement in Western Europe. Obviously its members
have chosen to ignore the Bush Administration’s extremely high
reputation for good works in Sub-Saharan Africa. But nothing much
can be done at this late date to alter the self-satisfying
anti-Bush sentiment internationally.
As an outgrowth of this irrational and highly personalized
attack on the soon-to-be former POTUS, Western European sentiment
against Bush has transformed itself into rabid support for Obama.
This has grown to the point where the implication is made that if
the American people do not vote in Barack Obama, “Suddenly
Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not
only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves.” So sayeth
Jonathan Freeland.
Apparently Americans are supposed to care about whom the
Europeans wish to be president in the U.S. What absurdity! It
wasn’t true when this nation was in formation, and it’s not true
now.
