Rise of an "Iraq Generation" in Europe While the
media publicize photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib (阿布格莱布监狱) as
evidence of US iniquity, her friends are expressing disbelief and
disappointment. They are also wondering how far the images may loosen
Washington’s grip on its claim to global moral leadership. In
the short term, European public disgust at the pictures probably rules out any
chance that America’s NATO allies will offer military help securing the
transition to Iraqi rule in Baghdad. In the long run, some observers worry, the
photographs could perpetuate a graver transatlantic rift. "They
might help create an ’Iraq Generation’ in Europe like the ’Vietnam Generation’",
suggests Bernhard May, an expert on European relations with the US at the
influential German Foreign Policy Society in Berlin. "If a whole generation
comes to think of America in terms of the Iraq war, then we are in trouble for
years to come." The best way for the US to salvage the
situation, European analysts tend to agree, is to hand over as much
responsibility for Iraq as possible to the United Nations, so as to give
international legitimacy to the authorities there. "We need to move to bring the
UN center stage much more urgently, and make sure that the Security Council has
true political authority over events in Iraq," argues Paul Wilkinson, professor
of International Relations at St. Andrews University in Scotland.
The prison photographs have so inflamed Iraqi and Arab opinion, however,
that the UN’s task of anointing a transitional Iraqi government is now even more
complicated. "A solution has to be found [to the problems in Iraq] but it
has been made immeasurably more difficult by the revelations about prisoner
mistreatment," says Lord Carrington, a former British foreign secretary. The
damage in Europe, however, is to America’s reputation and leadership,
particularly galling to supporters of the war such as French author Pascal
Bruckner, who bucked the French intellectual trend a year ago. "America… is
squandering a moral credit that was already eroded," Mr. Bruekner stated
recently. "Whatever she does she has lost the image battle, and her current
leaders will have achieved the exploit of making America hateful to the whole
world, including her own friends, allies, and neighbors. “ What the Polls Say Not that the current US
administration was very popular in the first place among European citizens,
resentful of what they see as Washington’s arrogance in world affairs. A poll
published in June by the Pew Foundation found that President Bush’s approval
ratings were 39 percent in Britain (the highest of the seven countries surveyed)
, 15 percent in France, and 14 percent in Germany. The Abu
Ghraib photographs emerged following several difficult weeks for the US-led
occupation forces in Iraq, when a lot seemed to be going wrong for them,
including a Shiite uprising and sustained resistance in Fallujah (费卢杰，地名) .
Those events appeared to comfort most Europeans in their conviction that the war
was wrong in the first place. "Acting on a false pretext--the famous weapons of
mass destruction--without United Nations’ support… [the Americans] owed it
to themselves to be irreproachable in their handling of the war and its
aftermath," Bruckner argued. By falling short of that standard,
the US authorities may have triggered repercussions that will be felt for many
years, some analysts fear. "The photographs show how far we have to go in
winning the battle of ideas as part of the fight against terrorism," says
Professor Wilkinson. "1 am worried about the low priority given to human rights
and the rule of law in the strategy against A1 Qaeda. If we don’t win the hearts
and minds of young Muslims we are creating a production line of new suicide
bombers." In Europe, meanwhile, the pictures reinforce negative
stereotypes of America that are common among young people, says Dr. May. "Kids
are telling their teachers they always said America followed double standards,
and here is the proof," he explains. "They see this as evidence of what they
believed all along that America is using force in the wrong way, that it doesn’t
respect its own value system, that it simply pursuing its own interests.
’ US officials’ insistence that only a few were responsible for
the prisoner abuse is not generally believed. European newspapers have given
wide publicity to the report of the Committee of the International Red Cross
that such mistreatment was systematic in parts of Abu Ghraib. In
Poland, whose government and people are perhaps the most wholeheartedly
pro-American on the Continent, "many people believed America represented the
morally correct cause in the conflict," says Janusz Reiter, head of the Center
for International Relations in Warsaw. "Now they have very severe
doubts." "This case has damaged America’s moral credibility, and undermined
Poles’ trust in the US as the political leader of the world". Mr. Reiter
worries, "But it is not irreparable." Signs of
Change Signs that Washington may be seeking to make amends
with its European allies have begun to sprout: the coalition has already given
the UN the lead role in establishing Iraq’s transitional government, due to take
power on June 30, for example. Washington is also believed to
have signed on to a French plan for a conference involving Iraq’s neighbors, to
draw them into reconstruction efforts, even though two of those neighbors are
Iran, an so-called "axis of evil" member, and Syria, against which Mr. Bush
imposed a trade embargo lately for allegedly supporting terrorism.
At the same time, the US State Department’s policy planning chief,
Mitchell Reiss, has been making soothing noises at public appearances in Europe.
In a speech in Berlin, for instance, be talked at length about the need for
transatlantic cooperation and dialogue. "The speech had everything we wanted to
bear, things we had not heard for two years," says May, who heard Reiss
speak. In the wake of Spain’s troop withdrawal, however,
Washington is facing an uphill struggle to convince other allies to keep their
soldiers in Iraq, and its hopes of persuading new contributors to join the
effort appear to have dropped to zero. US officials had hoped to
persuade NATO to take a formal role in Iraq after the transition to Iraqi rule,
but no such decision is expected now at the coming alliance summit in
Istanbul. With European mistrust of the US administration
running so high, "the last thing the Europeans want to do is come to the
alliance summit and allow George W. Bush to preside over the alliance as a great
leader," said Philip Gordon, a Brookings Institute scholar and coauthor of a new
book on the transatlantic rift over Iraq, in a recent speech to the
Transatlantic Center, a Brussels think tank. The Abu Ghraib
scandal "is a major blow to European support for action in Iraq to help the
Americans," says May. "It is a disaster for Iraq, a disaster for America,
and a disaster for transatlantic relations. It makes life a lot harder for
America’s friends in Europe. " Media publicized photographs of prisoner mistreatment by US.