Axis of irrelevance

Submitted by Jean Martin (United States), Jan 28, 2003 at 18:54

A couple of commentaries, one that I found at Townhall.com/columnists and another that I found on OpinionJournal.com, seemed to reflect that militarily (and even politically) "old Europe" was actually irrelevant to success or failure in the situation with Iraq. Oliver North was the author of the first, and his "Axis of Irrelevance" included not only France and Germany, but also the European Union and the United Nations. I have personally railed and stormed at the situation we find ourselves in, with the preponderance of sentiment in the U.N. being best described as anti-American, though the Security Council did vote for the first Iraq resolution. I actually feel that the journey to and through the U.N. was totally unnecessary, and that because of it, we are bogged down in geopolitical and bureaucratic nonsense. We are being blocked and "bogged" by people who seem no longer to be able to differentiate between good and evil, right and wrong, productive and destructive, forward-looking and backward-looking - i.e., our opponents are, in essence, reactionaries, living in a prior age, seemingly, unable to forget or forgive the errors of the past, either those of their own nations or ours. They seem confused and gullible, unable to sort out truth from falsehood, and riddled with, as Gelerntner says, self-loathing and guilt. They accept and act on blatant propaganda, and reject self-evident reality. It is, in fact, a desperately dangerous state of affairs, and the one tiny light that shines through to hope is our determination to destroy destructiveness before it destroys us and our civilization with us.

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