In case you were wondering where that letter of Euro-support came from...

[Zen-like Todd]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/03/opinion/03SAFI.html

And Now: Op-Ed Diplomacy

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

WASHINGTON ? Even before seven brave astronauts aboard Columbia perished in what President Bush called "the service to all humanity" in reaching for the stars, leaders of nine nations of Europe made plain their appreciation of what America stood for in the service of freedom here on Earth.

A politically weak chancellor of Germany, followed by a president of France eager to exploit popular anti-Americanism, had joined to drive a rift in the Atlantic Alliance. "Old Europe," in our Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's apt phrase, was presuming to speak for all the nations of Europe in resisting an American-led disarmament and liberation of Iraq.

The underlying purpose of the Schröder-Chirac push was less about protecting or defanging Saddam Hussein than it was about a much more parochial goal: to assert permanent Franco-German bureaucratic dominance over the growing federation of European states. Opposition to American superpower, they thought, was their lever of Archimedes to move the Old World.

But then, by happy accident, a new form of statecraft was born. "Op-ed diplomacy" has its antecedents ?? Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's démarche last year through my Times colleague Tom Friedman was one ? but mediation-by-media bloomed last week at the instigation of Michael Gonzalez, an op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal in Brussels.

"I knew that the Schröder-Chirac view of Saddam's threat was not shared by other European leaders," he tells me, "so I called Rome to get a piece by Prime Minister Berlusconi."

That started the ball rolling, which soon got out of The Journal's hands. The Italian leader liked the idea, but apparently didn't want to go it alone, and contacted José María Aznar, the like-minded Spanish prime minister. Aznar, even after the Bush mistake in letting the Koreans deliver a boatload of missiles to Yemen, wanted to make clear Spain stands with the U.S. on nonproliferation. He signed on and got in touch with his counterpart in Portugal and then in Britain with Tony Blair, the European trying hardest to hold the Atlantic Alliance together.

The journalistic interest of Journal editors Paul Gigot in New York and Therese Rafael in London was not in the op-ed copy itself, which at that point was being negotiated among a half-dozen prime ministers without their editorial help. What the journalists wanted was that whatever document the politicians worked out would be exclusive to their newspaper.

The media-savvy Blair said no; it had to be made available to an op-ed page of a newspaper in each country whose leader signed on. The op-ed diplomats were obliged to make that concession. (How many divisions has the Journal?)

The draft document was then circulated by the Europeans among other leaders thought to be (1) critical of the Franco-German proposal to assert dominance in the European Commission; (2) genuinely worried about their nations' exposure to weapons of mass destruction being developed by Saddam; and (3) eager to express solidarity with the United States, which three times in the past century had saved them from tyrannous takeover.

As deadline time approached, Schröder and Chirac, not invited to sign, got wind of the document and leaned hard against it. The Netherlands caved in, but Denmark and Poland did not waver. Hungary, where we are training a thousand Iraqi oppositionists (no Kurds allowed, lest Turks take offense), held firm.

The Czech Republic, in the throes of government transition, was on the fence, but at the last minute the departing president, Vaclav Havel, was reached and unhesitatingly signed. Slovakia followed.

In all, nine European nations issued a historic op-ed article calling Saddam "a clear threat to world security." Despite polls showing much local sentiment for appeasement, the leaders stated: "We cannot allow a dictator to systematically violate those [u.N.] resolutions. If they are not complied with, the Security Council will lose its credibility and world peace will suffer as a result."

Signatories to the new op-ed diplomacy laid it on the line to forgetful French and "ohne mich" (without me) Germans: "Today more than ever, the trans-Atlantic bond is a guarantee of our freedom."

As U.S. citizens receive condolences in the aftermath of our latest space disaster, we value most those from people who understand that Americans often risk their lives "in the service of all humanity."  

[redman]

The tie-in to the Columbia disaster seems a bit forced, but otherwise it's dead on. The French and Germans got a well-deserved bit of embarrassment.