ANOTHER SUPERB PIECE

By Victor Davis Hanson at NRO.

You'll want to read it all here.

We are not the only ones who know all of this. The German government realizes that these radical changes will prove for the universal good. For all of its election-inspired anti-American rhetoric last year, Germany accepts that the United States is not colonizing Iraq or siphoning off its oil, but rather spending billions of its own money, after a risky military operation, to help the Iraqi people — whether bringing water back to the Marsh Arabs, federalism to the Kurds, or respect and dignity to the Shiites.

Those facts cannot be spun and will not go away: American soldiers stationed in Iraq are no more exploitative than those in Germany, but are instead there to keep the peace and provide security, just as once they saved the Germans from themselves, and then kept the Russian bear out of Munich and Hamburg.

This truth, deep down, the Germans accept, and it explains why, for all of his prevarication, Mr. Schroeder knows that he is on the wrong side of history in his dispute with the United States. He is just now starting to sense that it is the American public, not a neoconservative cabal, that feels something is amiss with the transatlantic relationship, which from trade to defense largely benefited the Europeans.

If Mr. Schroeder is not careful, in a year from now there will be very few American troops in Germany; his socialist government will be faced with spending billions for its own security, with a piqued United States that for once will not so readily come to Germany's aid in its inevitable hour of crisis; Iraq will enjoy a consensual government despite German opposition to the removal of Saddam Hussein; and France will be Berlin's chief and perhaps only major ally. Ditto on a smaller scale for tagalongs like Belgium and Greece.

The French may even cease their overt opposition, not from appreciation that what the United States did in Iraq is for the long-term good of the world, but from a reality check provided by the last few months, which have not been as good for them as they think. There are cracks in the European Union, and the idea of choosing France over the Americans is odious even for most Europeans. Triangulating may for the moment play well in the Middle East, but ultimately Arabs will accept that the United States, not a harping France, risked so much to liberate Iraq. And when 10,000 of its own elderly citizens expired in their apartments while millions lounged at the beach, French claims of moral and political singularity were exposed as a fraud. And France, remember, traffics in images, not power.

So France, too, risks being an observer while the greatest democratic experiment of the age goes on in Iraq, isolated from the United States, which may well reconsider its clandestine support for France that so often facilitated Gallic military adventures abroad in Africa and elsewhere. A democratic, prosperous — and lucrative — Iraq is only in France's interest, especially when someone else risked the blood and treasure to achieve it.

We never did like going it alone in Iraq, but there is also a growing sense by both supporters and critics here that we are in essence going it alone nonetheless — and won't stop until the democratic reconstruction of Iraq is complete. For France and Germany — who gave no material or military support, but offered much overt hostility — there grows the realization that when we are done in Iraq, we might be in a sense done with both of them as well — a liberating, not a depressing, thought for millions of Americans. Demographic problems, statism, anti-democratic trends of the EU, failure to assimilate immigrants, pacifism and a disarmed continent, and intellectual bankruptcy and Pavlovian anti-Americanism among an elite — all that and more will be for them to handle in the decades to come.