LETTERS TO THE EDITOR:
Lucid leaders battle Europe's ostrich tendency
(This title is the FT’s choice, not the author’s)
By Jean-Christian Lambelet
Financial Times; Apr 16, 2003
From Mr Jean-Christian Lambelet.
Sir, It does not matter whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or whether some will be found. The incontrovertible fact is that, prior to the 1991 war, he squandered his country's God-given wealth in a megalomaniac but largely successful effort to get a full array of WMDs. His wicked aim was to turn Iraq into a military superpower. It is possible that the subsequent embargo, inspections and sanctions efficaciously barred him from resuming his devilish endeavours, but these measures could not have been applied indefinitely if only because they were inflicting much harm on ordinary Iraqi people. Had they been lifted, Saddam would have immediately resumed his WMD programmes; there can be no doubt about it. This is why he and his regime had to be removed.
More generally, the world has become an increasingly dangerous place since the end of the cold war. The prospect of nuclear-armed Iranian ayatollahs is bone-chilling (originally : “... Persian ayatollahs...”). North Korea may still turn into a significant threat to the world's security. On the Indian subcontinent we may soon witness the first use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Clearly, all this calls for some measure of security and order to be imposed on the planet. Ideally it should be done on a fully collective and co-operative basis, but this is very unlikely. Failing that, the US can and should do it on its own. Let us, however, hope that something in between will eventually emerge: ie, a broad collective effort under strong US leadership.
It is a real pity that European peoples - in their vast majority, and not excluding the British - do not seem to understand all this. As the story goes, the newsreels showing Japanese atrocities in 1937 Shanghai elicited a storm of protests when they were shown in French movie theatres, not because they were atrocities but because the audiences did not want to see them. Much the same is happening today in Europe - its peoples simply do not wish to be bothered by anything as improper as a war, not matter how necessary and justified.
Regrettably, the efforts of a few courageous and lucid leaders such as José María Aznar, the Spanish prime minister, and above all Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, do not seem to have had much effect on this ostrich-like attitude. Consequently Europe as a whole is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant on the world political stage. Economically it is still a leading power. But if history is any guide, international political irrelevancy might well be followed by economic decline too.
Jean-Christian Lambelet, Professor of Economics, University of Lausanne, CH-1015, Switzerland