Soccer Dad

Letter to the Editor

Last week Madeline Albright expressed her horror in the Baltimore Sun that America was not popular in Europe. I took strong exception to her arguments. One of the reasons we suffered through 9/11 was because the Clinton Administration was a "Holiday from History" in the words of Charles Krauthammer.
Albright writes:

In October I spent three weeks in Europe, hoping to find passions cooling and anti-American sentiments receding. Instead I was told, even by normally pro-American officials, that European hostility had only grown deeper as the months passed with no weapons of mass destruction being found in Iraq and without any sign of recognition by Bush that there had been any merit to Europe's prewar warnings.

My European friends were not shy in telling me that Americans appeared to them simultaneously besotted with power and unnerved by terror, increasingly overbearing, jingoistic and rash.

Europeans appreciated the trauma of the Sept. 11 attacks, I was told, but were baffled by the idea that an attack on Iraq should be the centerpiece of America's response. Saddam Hussein was a rotter, they conceded, but no imminent threat - and he was blameless for Sept. 11.

The Sun published my letter and the letter of another fellow. I'm happy to say that its editors did a pretty good job of editing. The letters were published yesterday:

And I laughed aloud about Ms. Albright's unshy "European friends" -- hand-picked from the finest écoles and salons, I'm guessing -- complaining to her. I'm sure that they would make suitable dinner table companions to those American elites who champion "international institutions" over their own, as if the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were the obstacles to world peace, not terrorist insurgencies funded by totalitarian states.

was from Daylin Louderback, I wrote:

In the eight years of the Clinton administration, America's security eroded as the threat to America changed to a more diffuse one. Despite some successes -- such as defeating the Slobodan Milosevic-run Serbia -- by retreating shamefully from Somalia, attacking al-Qaida with nothing more than a few missiles and honoring the world's most successful terrorist, Yasser Arafat, the Clinton administration emboldened America's new enemies, convincing them that America did not have the stuff to fight back.

I'm glad to see that I wasn't alone. It's been awhile since I've had a letter published in the Sun, it was nice to get back.

Posted by SoccerDad at January 11, 2004 02:20 PM | TrackBack