February 25, 2005, 8:23 a.m.
Snake Charmer
Note to GWB: All them vipers are deaf.

The little flute made the trite racket of meaningless "friendship" and the snakes all looked extremely European. Thus does the grand fence-mending excursion of George W. Bush now happily draw to a close. For a four-night tour, it had everything — fancy dinners, giant-sized photo ops, flatulent rhetoric, and close media analyses of handshakes and asides. In fact, Bush's charm offensive had everything — except charm.

That leaves only offensiveness, which of course was provided by the Europeans and their lighthearted media. Columnists and news items blasted Bush and the U.S. — one Guardian ranter: "Why are we welcoming this torturer?" — while polls showed that Europeans not only dislike Dubya, they don't care much for the electorate he rode in on either.

None of this was unexpected. In fact, we've all seen it before in Colin Powell's repeated and increasingly pitiful pleas for French and German support at the U.N. and elsewhere. The results of that ersatz strategy was to give strength to the arguments of our adversaries and to allow them to impede American policy in Iraq, despite the deep complicity of many of them, and especially France, in the corruption that kept Saddam's boats afloat.

In fact, one might argue that by allowing France and Germany to play the roles of arbiter and spoiler over and over again, the Bush administration's nice-guy ploys have done as much damage to U.S.-EU relations as the invasion itself. Every good cowpoke knows that if your livestock won't go where you want them to go, the best way to negotiate is to make sure all their other options suck. Maybe Bush is a frog-whisperer, but so far, it's not working.

In fact, he seemed bent on playing the rube. He not only opened his visit by blasting Israel — not helpful on a continent rife, as the International Herald Tribune observed, with anti-Semitism, neo-fascists, and angry young Muslims — but in a mystifying appearance before the EU, reported by the Guardian, he seemed to endorse the odious EU constitution and called for a stronger "Europe." For an ostensibly conservative chap who is stumping around on a freedom-first message, that was confusing, since a stronger EU means limiting democracy in places where ruling elites are working to secure their positions by watering and feeding vast bureaucracies and expensive social programs that have already bribed many to avoid the messiness of liberty and opportunity. Maybe he saw the EU as just a bigger version of his own Department of Education. Or maybe, as the Guardian report suggests, he just needs friends:

When a French reporter asked Mr Bush whether relations had improved to the point where the US president could invite Mr Chirac to his ranch in Texas, Mr Bush joked: "I'm looking for a good cowboy."

At a NATO summit, Bush boasted that the alliance was unanimous in deciding to back the American effort in Iraq, while Le Monde pointed out only "limited" support. What an understatement. To describe some of that support as "token" would be to discredit Mel Gibson's Oscar nominations or David Brooks's presence on the New York Times op-ed page: Estonia, for example, announced it was going to send a guy with just enough money to buy his own car, while France was going to dispatch a single soldier to help the Iraqis defend their freedom. As reported in the IHT and elsewhere, Bush's utterly readable lips said, "Every contribution helps..." but he's wrong. In fact, if he had to eat those words, he'd be lunching on junk food. When nations like France amuse themselves by making these patently comical moves, they not only diminish the likelihood that they will ever do more — France also claims to be thinking about training some Iraqi cops and contributing money for the effort, but for sure nobody's counting on that — they also make it likely that others will limit their contributions to frivolous odds and ends in order to pay obedience to an alliance that's already a fraud. These gestures may be symbolic to Bush and to the American press, but they're worse than useless because to the French and other Europeans, they are wryly cynical, just another way of goofing on a dumb Yank.

By the time Bush reached Germany, the trip had turned into political vaudeville (in fact, a small, pro-U.S. demo orchestrated by the bloggers at Davids Medienkritik surprisingly drew its share of attention). According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Bush was comparing Iraq now to Berlin 1989 — maybe not a great idea, since recent polls have shown that many Germans now regret the wall ever fell. The headline in the Frankfurter Allgemeine was "Nothing Lost" — but nothing gained, either: Schroder's buddy-talk about Iraq was as empty as Chirac's, and nothing the two men said did anything to turn around the serious commitment Germany and France have made to relegate NATO to the sidelines and keep it out the way of the EU's triffidlike growth.

The only way for Bush to salvage the whole adventure was to go to Slovakia, where, before generally happy crowds, he blindsided Russia's Putin, who thought he was showing up to talk about terrorism, but ended up getting a justifiable upbraiding about his country's threatened relapse into totalitarianism. The big take-away: Putin agreed that Iran and North Korea shouldn't have nukes, something he agreed to long ago, but never mind. Russia wasn't about to stop trading with Iran any more than (as Ian Black in the Guardian reports) the EU is going to reconsider its plan to sell weapons to the Chinese — who, of course, sell weapons to Iran, too. As this piece (.pdf alert!) in Parliament Magazine by MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit shows, nothing Bush could have said or done would have made a bit of difference, so he might as well have done some of his famous straight-talking.

Besides, the biggest diplomatic news took place while Bush was away: According to La Libre, our northern France, those seal-whacking, anti-American Canadians, backed out of the missile-defense program. So Bush brings home few souvenirs of triumph. He didn't slip and fall and he didn't make any notable Bushisms, so that's good. But having given anti-Americanism a renewed focus, he leaves Europe not to cheers, but to boos — and to even more hisses. A smart man wouldn't turn his back so quickly. The snakes may be back in the basket, but they're still snakes — and all snakes are deaf.

ITEMS

I don't normally run letters as such, but a couple of notes were interesting enough to merit passing along, I thought.

Mailbox item 1 is from Armand Laferrere, a Parisian who writes occasionally for Eursoc and for a number of French political journals. He describes a night at the movies in which "a young French-Arab journalist — modern-looking, apparently cool" — was previewing a documentary he'd shot in Iraq for French TV. "He had gone to Sadr City after Moqtada al-Sadr's meltdown in Najaf, but before the election, and he filmed a bunch of brainwashed kids shouting their praise of Sadr," Armand writes.

After the film, the young director explained to the audience that "the Shia are Islamicizing the country."

He started rambling that...France had been right to oppose the war for "if France had taken another position, there would have been an intifada here — there would have been attacks all over the country...you better not notice that the Iraqis were happy to vote or that America is succeeding, if you love your life."

Well, what was I to do? I left, saying, "I don't have to listen to your threats on my country" — legally, it's his country as well, but he seems to believe it in the way the British conquerors said, "India is ours." I couldn't stop noticing that nobody followed me — and that...before I had spoken, some non-Muslim French people were nodding approvingly [at what the young director had said].

God bless America.

Mailbox item 2 is from Bruno José Lebeau, the doughty editor of several pro-American web 'zines. Bruno is angry that Bush's visit is shoring up Chirac's anti-American stance because the French press has used the visit as evidence that "United States would need European support to win war on terror in Iraq, to win peace in Middle East."

If you were French, you'd understand that...four years of "war on America" has deeply turned France against America. I'm unemployed and rejected everywhere because of my past position for Bush. Everybody has let me down, and I'm deeply hopeless. They cannot stand I was right to support Bush. The more Bush appears right, the more they reject me. It's very hard for me, and now I've only 300 dollars a month to live with my wife and my 2 children. Everywhere I go, chairmen and directors tell me "they cannot employ me"...France is a little country, and the power of government is strong. I don't regret my choice, even if I pay the price now. I pray very strongly for America, for Bush. I know I was right.

British trinkets. The western and southern parts of France are being slowly occupied by an invading army of Brits (and not a few Dutch) who like to buy mud-and-stick farm huts and fashion them into something a bit charming, don't you know. This irritates the French who don't want the old hovels but who don't want the English very much either. This being France and all, demos have broken out in sleepy Breton hamlets. The Guardian equipped Steven Moss with a shopping bag filled with British tourist crap and sent him on a "one-man peace initiative." The result is quite a hoot.

— Denis Boyles is author of Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese.