Kyoto nor the ICC ever risked passage into law while he was in office—was often much the same. More fundamentally, as political operations, a straight line led from the war in the Balkans to the war in Mesopotamia. In both, a casus belli—imminent genocide, imminent nuclear weapons—was trumped up; the Security Council ignored; international law set aside; and an assault unleashed.
United over Yugoslavia, Europe split over Iraq, where the strategic risks were higher. But the extent of European opposition to the march on Baghdad was always something of an illusion. On the streets, in Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain, huge numbers of people demonstrated against the invasion. Opinion polls showed majorities against it everywhere. But once it had occurred, there was little protest against the occupation, let alone support for the resistance to it. Most European governments—Britain, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal in the West; all in the East—backed the invasion, and sent troops to bulk up the US forces holding the country down. Out of the fifteen member-states of the EU in 2003, just three—France, Germany and Belgium—came out against the prospect of war before the event. None condemned the attack when it was launched. But the declared opposition of Paris and Berlin to the plans of Washington and London gave popular sentiment across Europe a point of concentration, confirming and amplifying its sense of distance from power and opinion in America. The notion of an incipient Declaration of Independence by the Old World was born here.
Realities were rather different. Chirac and Schröder had a domestic interest in countering the invasion. Each judged their electorates well, and gained substantially—Schröder securing reelection—from their stance. On the other hand, American will was not to be trifled with. So each compensated in deeds for what they proclaimed in words, opposing the war in public, while colluding with it sub rosa. Behind closed doors in Washington, France’s ambassador Jean-David Levitte—currently diplomatic adviser to Sarkozy—gave the White House a green light for the war, provided it was on the basis of the first generic UN Resolution 1441, as Cheney urged, without returning to the Security Council for the second explicit authorization to attack which Blair wanted, that would force France to veto it. In ciphers from Baghdad, German intelligence agents provided the Pentagon with targets and coordinates for the first US missiles to hit the city, in the downpour of Shock and Awe. Once the ground war began, France provided airspace for USAF missions to Iraq (passage Chirac had denied Reagan’s bombing of Libya), and Germany the key transport hub for the campaign. Both countries voted for the UN resolution ratifying the US occupation of Iraq, and lost no time recognizing the client regime patched together by Washington.
As for the EU, its choice of a new president of the Commission in 2004 could not have been more symbolic: the Portuguese ruler who hosted Bush, Blair and Aznar at the Azores summit on 16 March 2003 that issued the ultimatum for the assault on Iraq. Barroso is in good company. France now has a foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had no time for even the modest duplicities of his country about America’s war, welcoming it as another example of the droit d’ingérence he had always championed. Sweden, where once a prime minister could take a sharper distance from the war in Vietnam than De Gaulle himself, has a new minister for foreign affairs to match his colleague in Paris: Carl Bildt, a founder member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, along with Richard Perle, William Kristol, Newt Gingrich and others. In the UK, the local counterpart has proudly restated his support for the war, though here, no doubt, the corpses were stepped over in pursuit of preferment rather than principle. Spaniards and Italians may have withdrawn their troops from Iraq, but no European government has any policy towards a society destroyed by America that is distinct from the outlook in Washington.
For the rest, Europe remains engaged to the hilt in the war in Afghanistan, where a contemporary version of the expeditionary force dispatched to crush the Boxer Rebellion has killed more civilians this year than the guerrillas it seeks to root out. The Pentagon did not require the services of NATO for its lightning overthrow of the Taliban, though British and French jets put in a nominal appearance. Occupation of the country, which has a larger population and more forbidding terrain than Iraq, was another matter, and a NATO force of five thousand was assembled to hold the fort around Kabul, while US forces finished off Mullah Omar and Bin Laden. Five years later, Omar and Osama remain at large; the West’s puppet ruler Karzai cannot move without a squad of mercenaries from DynCorp International to protect him; production of opium has increased ten-fold; the Afghan resistance has become steadily more effective; and NATO-led forces—now comprising contingents from thirty-seven nations, from Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey and Poland down to such minnows as Iceland—have swollen to 35,000, alongside 25,000 US troops. Indiscriminate bombing, random shooting, and ‘human rights abuses’, in the polite phrase, have become commonplaces of the counter-insurgency.
In the wider Middle East, the scene is the same. Europe is joined at the hip with the US, wherever the legacies of imperial control or settler zeal are at stake. Britain and France, original suppliers of heavy water and uranium for the large Israeli nuclear arsenal, which they pretend does not exist, demand along with America that Iran abandon programmes it is allowed even by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, under menace of sanctions and war. In Lebanon, the EU and the US prop up a cabinet that would not last a day if a census were called, while German, French and Italian troops provide border guards for Israel within the country. As for Palestine, the EU showed no more hesitation than the US in plunging the population into misery, cutting off all aid when voters elected the wrong government, on the pretext that it must first recognize the Israeli state, as if Israel had ever recognized a Palestinian state, and renounce terrorism—read: any armed resistance to a military occupation that has lasted forty years without Europe lifting a finger against it. Funds now flow again, to protect a remnant valet in the West Bank.
Questionable some of this record may be, lovers of Europe might reply. But these are external issues, that can scarcely be said to affect the example Europe sets the world of respect for human rights and the rule of law within its own borders. The performance of the EU or its member-states may not be irreproachable in the Middle East, but isn’t the moral leadership represented by its standards at home what really counts, internationally? So good a conscience comes too easily, for the War on Terror knows no frontiers. The crimes committed in its name have stalked freely across the continent, in the full cognizance of its rulers. Originally, the sub-contracting of torture—‘rendition’, or the handing over of a victim to the attentions of the secret police in client states—was, like so much else, an invention of the Clinton administration, which introduced the practice in the mid-nineties. Asked about it a decade later, the CIA official in charge of the programme, Michael Scheuer, simply said: ‘I check my moral qualms at the door’.16 As one would expect, it was Britain that collaborated with the first renditions, in the company of Croatia and Albania.
Under the Bush administration, the programme expanded. Three weeks after 9/11, NATO declared that Article V of its charter, mandating collective defence in the event of an attack on one of its members, was activated. By then American plans for the descent on Afghanistan were well advanced, but they did not include European participation in Operation Enduring Freedom—the US high command had found the need for consultations in a joint campaign cumbersome in the Balkan War, and did not want to repeat the experience. Instead, at a meeting in Brussels on 4 October 2001, the allies were called upon for other services. The specification of these remains secret, but—as the second report to the Council of Europe by the courageous Swiss investigator Dick Marty, released in June 2007, has shown—high on the list agreed on this occasion must have been a stepped-up programme of renditions. Once Afghanistan was taken, the Bagram air base outside Kabul became both interrogation centre for the CIA and loading-bay for prisoners to Guantánamo. The traffic was soon two-way, and its pivot was Europe. In one direction, captives were transported from Afghan or Pakistani dungeons to Europe, either to be held there in secret CIA jails, or shipped onwards to Cuba. In the other direction, captives were flown from secret locations in Europe for requisite treatment in Afghanistan.
Though NATO initiated this system, the abductions it involved were not confined to members of the North Atlantic Council. Europe was eager to help America, whether or not fine print obliged it to do so. North, South, East and West: no part of the continent failed to join in. New Labour’s contribution occasions no surprise: with up to 650,000 civilians dead from the Anglo-American invasion