On the Right.

A Hard Day's Viewing

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 4

The History Channel on television had an hour on the First World War. It focused on the attempt by the British to build parallel tunnels that would permit explosives to be detonated inside the German lines in eastern France. The megaton explosives would all go off at the same moment, the British would charge forward, and then make their way to the Belgian port of Ostend to estop the German submarines that were choking Britain to death. The tunnel project took two years. And when time came to move the troops and artillery pieces forward, the rains began, soldiers dropped into the mud and drowned, and not even 100 men could haul artillery pieces out of the mud ruts in which they were stuck. The British had an army of 249,000 when the war started, and now 5 million were mobilized. The Americans arrived in 1917 with 750,000 troops. Casualties in a single day's fighting reached as many as 50,000. Ten million died by the war's end.

Sixty Minutes, one hour later, featured a German doctor who had come home from spending 14 months in North Korea. He told Mike Wallace that he was devoting his time to trying to give an apathetic public some idea of what life is like in that country. Starvation happens before your very eyes. Hospitals use milk bottles to store such medicines as there are. -- Can't they get out some idea of how miserably they live? Mike Wallace asked. -- No. No they can't. There is zero communication with the outside world. Radios are soldered in to the Pyongyang channel. There is a single sign of life: 1 million preening soldiers. That's the equivalent of 30 million Americans in uniform.

And then television gave a reprise of the awful minutes ending the lives of seven human beings, 39 miles from earth, up in the skies, traveling at 12,500 miles per hour. The brief eulogy by President Bush was replayed. He told us that the victims had a "high and noble purpose" in life, that "mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world" by a "longing to understand." He closed with the ultimately understanding words of the prophet Isaiah, who said that God knew the names of every one of the stars He created, so also of the crew of the shuttle Columbia.

So also of the dead in World War I trenches? And the living dead in North Korea? And the impending dead in Iraq?

The hour on television displayed the screeching need both for an understanding, and for a longing to understand, how the star-maker countenances what we do in war and peace on the earth on which we were given free rein. And what we fail to do. We will make an effort in the Mideast, but none is in prospect in the north Pacific, two areas of the world which the seven astronauts overflew 100 times, serene that they were out of harm's way, a dream they died dreaming.

McCain Levels With NATO 

BRUSSELS, FEBRUARY 11

The talk at NATO headquarters, a great sprawl in the outskirts of Brussels, the center of which was once a Belgian hospital, is of the impasse over Turkey. Not exactly an impasse: The United States and its allies will eventually have their way, tendering effective protection to Turkey against Iraqi Scud missiles. But the diplomatic fissure is great, exacerbated by parliamentary moves and countermoves.

What matters substantively is that France and Germany (and Belgium) elected on Monday to reaffirm their month-long opposition to pre- emptive, pre-war help to Turkey. What drew attention was the novel invocation by Turkey of Article IV of the NATO treaty. It is not surprising that no one knew what it says, even as no one remembers what Article IV of the U.S. Constitution says. The mind skips over to NATO Article V, which is the pledge of NATO nations to help one another when attacked. Turkey, which has promised bases to the United States when and if needed in the proceedings against Iraq, had been turned down by NATO in its request for anti-missile missiles, and now invoked Article IV, which calls for "consultations" among NATO allies against a potential threat.

What happened at NATO was a refusal, engineered by France and Germany, immediately to grant the implicit fraternal succor of consultation against potential aggression. The French argued that this would presuppose an act of aggression by Iraq, and to do so would be to compromise ongoing U.N. inspection procedures. And indeed, Iraq has decreed that any arming of Turkey designed to augment the U.S. effort in the area would be deemed an act of war.

Two days before, Secretary Rumsfeld and Sen. John McCain were among the speakers at the Munich Conference on European Security Policy. Mr. Rumsfeld reiterated the reasons given by Messrs. Bush and Powell for proceeding against Iraq. There were no surprises in the Rumsfeld speech, though it was vigorous and persuasive, exhibiting his skills as a confident and resourceful leader. He called shrewd attention to the progressive isolation of the NATO dissenters, up against the growing coalition of world leaders joined in the adamant stand we have taken on Iraq.

What was very special was the speech by Sen. McCain. Mr. McCain has a large constituency, and many took it for granted that his appeal would be to liberal ambiguists. The toughness of his language to describe European dissenters was especially arresting for those liberals who have thought that Sen. McCain would be ambivalent on the Iraq question. Hardly. He sounded like General Curtis LeMay (forgotten, like Article IV) sounding the tocsin for relentless military action. It is right, he said, to abide by the mandate of international institutions when these act, as the United Nations did in Resolution 1441, to defend the cause of security. Otherwise, there is chaos, as nations struggle without the assurance of collective action. "The United States might succeed [to survive] in such an environment, though I hate to contemplate it, but many nations, including many in Europe, will not."

There was still hope, when McCain spoke those words, that France and Germany would back away, on the Turkish question, before the Monday deadline. They didn't. "If this minority of French-German obstruction is not overcome . . . France and Germany will have to answer to those who argue that Iraq could be to NATO what Abyssinia was to the League of Nations."

There is of course time to make things right, though no substantial contribution by France to the Iraqi military enterprise is expected, and Germany has forsworn any contribution. What McCain thinks of as permanently damaged is the effectiveness of the NATO alliance, devotedly pursued in Brussels, athwart the political opportunism not only of France and Germany, but also Belgium -- the country that shelters not only NATO, but the headquarters of the European Union, which shares suburban acreage outside the city of Brussels: two headquarters, symbols for so long of security and hope in a Europe scarred by failures to heed sound counsel over the first 50 years of the bloody century gone by, and bedeviled by internecine faction, now grown to a major NATO crisis.

The Spoils of Glory

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 14

The whole world, it seems, hangs on the future within NATO of the current dispute. The sense of it, in parts of Europe, is that Germany accidentally tripped into its present position. For one, there was -- there is -- the brooding matter of its military-imperialist past, and the sense that binds it, as it does Japan, in those postwar loincloths of innocence that make Machtpolitik something of an impiety, let alone a question of tanks and missiles and bayonets. There came then the accidental success of marginal candidate Gerhard Schroeder, who brushed the anti-American cream off the top of the electoral vat and scored an upset victory. He and Germany are stuck with it, and will come around on the matter of help to Turkey only if a formula sufficiently emasculating is contrived.

The plight of France is brilliantly examined by the Strategic Forecasting Intelligence unit (www.stratfor.com) of Texas. The analyst reminds us of the basic problem of modern France, which is that it isn't strong enough to figure dominantly on the international scene by the mere deployment of its geopolitical or commercial resources. This requires a very heavy load on its cultural resources. These are formidable, but how many operas comiques are needed to float out the single French aircraft carrier? The Charles de Gaulle has scarcely left harbor during its accident-prone existence. The British sage Paul Johnson, summarizing France's straitened military, writes that "there is no chance of the French cutting a bella figura in any hostilities, and so the easy way out for her is to oppose them."

The aircraft carrier's eponym intuited the problem in 1966, when, as president of France, he dramatically pulled the French out of the NATO administration. He did not pull out of NATO -- France is still a member of that alliance -- but the authority to deploy the French military remains that of France alone. It is because of that rupture that the NATO administration was relocated to Brussels, where it sits cheek by jowl with the European Union. If every one of the NATO powers were to abide by de Gaulle's maxims -- never divest yourself of your own power, but engage in ad hoc alignments to magnify that power -- a stable alliance would be impossible. And the challenge of Iraq is illustrating an instability we'd have done better to anticipate more skillfully. What we have now, of course, is the challenge of taming the Iraqi beast, and the need to absorb a NATO alliance with room given for the caprice of the two major nations of -- old Europe.

The parliamentarians are getting great exercise in the libertine theater. There is the sense of independence not only from the power of the superpower, but from the restraints that attach to ordered rhetoric. Belgium wants, no less, to try General Sharon, after he leaves office, as a war criminal. That is the kind of thing against which cool heads warned when General Pinochet suddenly found himself a prisoner in London. Donald Rumsfeld let it fly against Germany that in behaving as it lately has, it is in the same league as Cuba and Libya.

"In recent months," writes Paul Johnson in National Review, the anti- American pitch "has surpassed itself in its fury at the notion of 'Texas adolescents' wielding more power than 'European sophisticates.' Mixed in this bouillabaisse of rage are anti-Semitism, a distrust of popular democracy, frustrated socialism, and a smug use of French cultural superiority." What to do? "When the French elites are in such a mood they are beyond the reach of argument and are best ignored."

-- Universal Press Syndicate