Salon.com > Noah Sudarsky

Europe’s new world order

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 00:08:00 +0000

The bitter standoff between the Bush administration and three longtime European allies over Iraq war plans continued for a third day Wednesday, as France, Germany and Belgium rejected the United States' scaled-down request that NATO prepare to defend Turkey from an attack by Saddam Hussein.

The argument is largely symbolic, and the U.S. has promised to bolster Turkish defenses without the blessing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization if necessary. But the division over Iraq is so stark and so deep that some analysts say it could precipitate the rise of a new world order in which Europe acts as an independent power to check and contain the U.S.

Stresses in the alliance have been growing since last fall, when European leaders and Bush administration moderates prevailed in getting the U.S. to take its case against Iraq to the United Nations. The latest conflict, however, is widely seen as the worst in the 53-year history of NATO and a defining moment in the post-Cold War era.

Europe’s declaration of independence

Sat, 25 Jan 2003 20:41:00 +0000

As American and British forces continue to flock to the Persian Gulf, a stunning global rift is reaching historic proportions. Not since the end of WWII has Germany, one of America's staunchest allies, refused to support the U.S. on a major foreign policy issue. And now, France, which was instrumental in defining the terms of United Nations Resolution 1441, has opted to join the ranks of the "refusal camp," as it is being called here. Both countries in recent days reiterated that they would block the U.S. request for military and logistical support from NATO to prepare for a war with Iraq. Unthinkable a decade ago, such a move could be a sign that old alliances are in for a profound change.

Appearing to catch Colin Powell off guard during a press conference following an anti-terrorism summit at the U.N., French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin lambasted the idea of waging a war on Iraq, saying that "nothing today justifies...military action." The Washington Post called the surprise declaration "the diplomatic equivalent of an ambush," but it was only the expression of the most widely held view in France, where 77 percent of the population opposes a war. In Germany, the percentage is identical. And while the Bush administration has at times placed great weight on Monday's expected report from the U.N. weapons inspection team, it is considered by most European governments as merely an interim stage in the disarmament process. The Middle East, French President Jacques Chirac says, "does not need another war."

Sharon’s master plan: Endless war, endless occupation

Thu, 25 Jul 2002 19:53:00 +0000

Dropping a 1-ton bomb onto the residential building that was the hideaway of Hamas' top field marshal, killing over a dozen civilians along with Sheik Salah Shehada, represents a strategic shift for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa intifada, the Likud leader's primary preoccupation has been to discredit, dismantle and disempower the Palestinian Authority. Now that that objective has been virtually attained, Sharon can turn to his most pressing objective: making sure that the cycle of violence continues indefinitely, thereby guaranteeing (at the cost of increasing the Israeli civilian death toll at the hands of Palestinian suicide bombers) that Israel will never pull its troops, or settlers, out of the occupied territories.

France’s vacation from democracy

Wed, 24 Apr 2002 19:34:00 +0000

Ever since Jean-Marie Le Pen first stormed the National Assembly as a raucous law student in 1956, the extremist National Front leader has tormented France's right-wing political establishment, which is embarrassed by his raving anti-immigrant views. But Sunday's presidential election marked the first time Le Pen managed to wreak havoc in the ranks of the left.

Receiving an unprecedented 17.8 percent of the vote in the first round of the election, he handed a resounding defeat to France's Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and to the entire establishment left that has been the cornerstone of the French government for the last five years. There is a chance, of course, that the May 22 legislative elections will redeem the prime minister's brand of pragmatic socialism, but it's just as likely that the entire center-left coalition has become political history.

Most of the headlines were about Le Pen, but the extreme left also scored a major victory in Sunday's elections, with Arlette Laguiller, the retired bank clerk and eternal maverick of French politics, snaring 6 percent of the vote. Altogether, the far left, including the forlorn Communist Party, managed to snag over 15 percent of the voters from the mainstream Socialists and their pedantic figurehead Jospin.

“We’re in the way”

Tue, 20 Nov 2001 23:38:00 +0000

New York firefighters won a huge symbolic victory Friday, when they prevailed on Mayor Rudy Giuliani to let 75 of them, three times the number Giuliani wanted, continue to participate in cleaning up and identifying remains at the World Trade Center site. But the belated victory is probably little more than symbolic, and it's unlikely to change the nature of what the World Trade Center site has become: a massive construction job. It's probably hard for anyone who wasn't there in the early days to understand the intensity of the firefighters' fury at Giuliani's decision to limit their presence at the site, which led to fistfights and arrests Nov. 2, when firemen clashed with cops, sometimes violently. I went back to the World Trade Center site a week after that melee, for the first time in over a month, having been a search and rescue worker in the days after the attack. I saw a radically changed Ground Zero, and I could understand the firefighters' fury.

Arafat’s bin Laden nightmare

Fri, 12 Oct 2001 20:24:00 +0000

When Palestinian security forces fired on Palestinian demonstrators brandishing portraits of Osama bin Laden on Columbus Day, it was a clear signal to American policy makers, who have long assumed that Yasser Arafat's basic attitude toward the radical factions of the Palestinian constituency was to turn a blind eye.

Although the Palestinian leader opposes the fundamentalist fanatics of Hamas and Hezbollah, he is also a shrewd opportunist, and he was loath to undermine his popularity within Palestinian ranks by attacking these powerful groups or their supporters directly -- until now.

Bin Laden's strategies, in many respect, reflect those of Palestinian fringe groups in the late 1960s such as George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was in direct competition with Arafat's Al Fatah. Whereas Arafat believed in armed struggle, including commando operations within Israel and acts of sabotage against Israeli targets, he strongly condemned acts of terrorism, particularly against objectives outside Israel. By contrast, Ahmad Jibril's PFLP-General Command and Habash's PFLP favored acts of terror on an international scale. In the summer of 1968, Jibril's "Fedayeen" hijacked an Israeli plane to Algiers, and in February 1970 blew up a Swissair flight en route to Israel, killing nearly 50 people. Habash's PFLP, which wanted to weaken the Jordanian regime and feared that the Arab states were preparing to make peace with Israel, was responsible for the spectacular hijacking of three planes to Jordan, sparking what came to be known as the Jordanian civil war of September 1970. If bin Laden is anyone's brainchild, he is George Habash's.