Europe Used To Be Something

Defense Secretary Robert "M for Macho" Gates says it like he thinks it is.  He may be in a Socialist Democratic administration, but he is still an All-American cowboy.

Macho pretty much said what we've all been thinking for months:  Europeans don't like war the way they are supposed to.

We don't know how this happened.  We've given them plenty of wars lately to show how much war can accomplish, how it promotes security.  Europeans used to enamored of war like no one else.  They had Hundred Years wars, Thirty Years wars, World wars, Napoleonic wars and lots of other named and unnamed wars.  For Centuries they didn't do much else, except, maybe, for the Black Death.  You have to wonder what happened to their appetite for armed conflict. 

Could it be that Europeans only like wars on their own soil?  No American can figure that one.

Really, though, Macho doesn't much care why the Europeans have turned namby-pamby. He is just concerned that NATO will lose the occasional Dutchman or Spaniard in the endless fight for peace against world-wide badness.

He didn't mince words, the way, say the French probably would, when he laid it out for some NATO types. According to the New York Times, Macho called the Continental sissies out. “The demilitarization of Europe--where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it-- has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st."

Tough language?  He used the word "swaths", for God's sake!  Large ones.  Europeans don't seem to like shooting and bombing people and are afraid there might be ramifications, like the ones they might miss shooting or bombing back.  But isn't that what peace is all about?

Macho wowed the NATO guys with this:  How can we ever have lasting peace without war? 

This is new thinking, right?  Has anyone ever said that we need war to have peace?  Not in my lifetime.  Very often. 

The proof is everywhere.  War brought lasting peace to the Iranian province of Iraq and has practically decorated Afghanistan with little flowers.

What brought Macho's anxiety out in public was The Netherlands flushing its pro-war government.  The land of cheese and tulips decided it didn't want to keep its collective finger in the Afghan dike any longer, Americans having far more fingers if fewer dikes. 

Furthermore, Europe barely spends the Euros on war they had promised to put out.  Five of twenty-eight countries spend two percent of GDP on war-making.  How weak is that?  The US, the only really dependable war-making beacon, spends more than four percent of its GDP (mostly Chinese Yuans) on tanks, missiles, submarines, soldiers and Defense Secretaries' secretaries. 

And for our leadership, we get less than two percent from yesterday's Huns, Vandals, Normans and Romans.  Those were heroes; they spent their ancient currencies, Francs, Lira, Marks dry, like so many dollars, and selflessly wiped out tens of millions in their quest for lasting peace.

And today's Europeans?  Pathetic and soft are words far too kind.  Especially when Macho uses "swaths".

TBO may be too busy band-aiding health care, but you know for sure that George III must be proud.