There are two great divides in Europe. One is the split between governments that are for or against war in Iraq. The other (and perhaps greater) divides the masses of people from the Baltics to the British Isles who oppose war and their leaders who have lined up with the United States. In Britain, Spain and Italy, prime ministers are going against huge antiwar majorities to side with America. So are the leaders of Eastern Europe, albeit against somewhat less daunting tides. In Greece, which quietly allows U.S. planes spying on Iraq to be based on the island of Crete, there’s so little support for war that nobody bothers to conduct polls on the matter.
The tense state of affairs has America’s European allies scrambling to turn public opinion. Thus British Prime Minister Tony Blair launched a major hearts-and-minds campaign last week, championing an invasion of Iraq as a just war to rid the world of Saddam. “An act of humanity,” he called it. With intelligence agencies across Europe fielding information about imminent terror attacks, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar told his Parliament it would be folly for the United Nations to falter now. Disarming Iraq, he said, “is essential for the world’s security. If the Baghdad regime moves from rhetoric to facts, it will only be because of the firm position shown by the international community and not only because the inspectors continue their work.”
Such pleas are not getting very far. Winning a second U.N. resolution could help. (British sources say London and Washington could table a second resolution early this week, possibly aided by Spain, with a vote coming between March 7 and March 14.) Without it, the public-relations battle may have to be won, like the war itself, in the deserts and marshlands of Iraq. If it comes to that, a source close to Blair told NEWSWEEK, “we hope it will be swift. No war is pain-free, but it will be relatively pain-light. And then we come out at the other end. We find the weapons of mass destruction. We destroy them. We hopefully set up a more representative, less torturous government.”
That may sound like wishful thinking, but at least it’s a plausible plan for winning over public opinion. There seem to be few others. In Britain, Blair has seen a steady erosion of support. Three months ago roughly half of all Britons would have supported going to war without a second U.N. resolution; less than 10 percent would do so today. So far, Blair has made little headway against that tide. Over the next few weeks he will continue to argue the need to get rid of Sad-dam on humanitarian grounds, even though he got a serious rebuff last week when the spiritual leaders of Britain’s two largest Christian denominations said they doubted the moral legitimacy of the war and shared a “deep disquiet” about it.
In Spain the story is the same. A recent El Mundo newspaper poll showed that 74 percent of Spaniards were against war in Iraq, even with a second resolution. Aznar remains loyal to Bush. He and Bush have a shared history. They are both politically right of center. Bush likes to dabble in the Spanish language (Aznar kindly over–looked the fact that Bush once mispronounced his name “Anzar”). They each enjoy a ranch-house retreat. Mostly, however, it is self-interest that draws them together. The United States has had for a long time a large and somewhat controversial military presence in Spain. It is easier for Aznar on his side on the political spectrum to admit to that presence, just as it is to sign up to a war by an American president who is widely disparaged and distrusted by the European left. Aznar, furthermore, can afford to stand on his convictions: he is well into his second term in office, and he will not run again when it expires next year.
In Italy, by contrast, antiwar pressures are apparently nudging Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi away from Bush. As recently as last week, the Italian Parliament voted to back Berlusconi’s support for U.S. military action as long as Italian troops were not part of the invasion. But Berlusconi himself seems to be backpedaling. “I have spoken with our American friends and told them to avoid becoming isolated,” he said. His own spokesman says Berlusconi prefers now to be seen as a “mediator” between pro- and antiwar leaders in Europe, not as a “no matter what” backer of U.S. policy on Iraq. It’s not clear that the new strategy is working. Most Italians–70 percent of whom are against a war in Iraq–remember him saying in December, “We want to be America’s best friend in Europe.”
Viewed from Washington, Europe presents a mixed picture. France, Germany, Belgium and Norway are solidly in the antiwar camp for the time being. Britain, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Portugal have allied themselves with U.S. policy. Other Western European countries are either neutral or fence sitters hoping a second resolution will light their way. Well to the east, Russia, with a sizable majority opposed to supporting America in a war, seems likely to follow the French and the Germans. But in between, across the vast expanse of the former Soviet bloc, 13 governments have signed up to either the “gang of eight” manifesto or the Feb. 5 “Vilnius 10” document pledging to stand “together to face the threat posed by the nexus of terrorism and dictators with weapons of mass destruction.”
On war and Iraq, these countries are in a more fragile state than they might seem from their plucky manifestos. What Ioana Radus of the Bucharest paper Ziua Daily says is certainly true for some people: “Because of our history, people believe Saddam Hussein must be eliminated. Romanians reject dictatorship–a reaction caused by our own painful experience.” Yet in country after country in Central and Eastern Europe, polls show powerful opposition to war.
Poland typifies the region’s dilemma. Only 14 years removed from communist rule, the country thinks of itself as part of Europe but bound by history to America, which it considers its best guarantee of security. It is scheduled to join the EU next year and is already part of NATO; indeed President Aleksander Kwasniewski is a leading contender to succeed NATO Secretary-General George Robertson in December. Poland’s economy will be increasingly integrated into Europe, but that doesn’t mean it won’t stray, as it did recently when Prime Minister Leszek Miller gave the green light to Poland’s $3.5 billion purchase of American F-16 fighter jets–infuriating France and other West European military suppliers.
No wonder public opinion is confused. And being confused, it lurches for the seeming high ground of being against war. Pro-war arguments get trampled under foot. “I watch Tony Blair and go, Wow! He’s brave! He’s brilliant!” says Stephen Pollard of the Center for the New Europe, who supports Bush and Blair on Iraq but has lost “an entire address book” of friends in the process. “But other people just aren’t hearing what I’m hearing.” Instead, he’s found that being antiwar has become the socially correct thing to do. “People were meeting at smart cafes and then going off to Hyde Park for the rally,” he says of the massive protests two weekends ago.
Those who support Washington’s stance toward Iraq, on the other hand, are in a tough position. Antiwar citizens can believe their leaders are acting from conviction and yet think they are misguided. Those who think they are acting based on political calculations can respect their acumen but not their moral stance. And, it must be said, the pro-Bush leaders have at times presented their case as clumsily as the Americans have. Taking a leaf from Colin Powell, the British government tried to convince Britons that Saddam and Al Qaeda were linked. Like Powell, they failed–tainting better arguments in the process. In what seemed a particularly desperate measure, Blair two weekends ago compared the number of people gassed, brutalized, tortured and killed by Saddam’s regime to the number of antiwar protesters on the streets of London. The polls sank.
Vaclav Havel, when he spoke at the NATO summit of resisting evil, also asserted the need to “always subject the matter to the most serious debate on all possible alternatives and all their conceivable consequences.” He’s certainly getting that wish. In the end, perhaps the war for public opinion can only be won by the real war, in Iraq. “But it must be a good war,” says Thomas Kielinger, London correspondent for Germany’s Die Welt. “Minimal collateral damage. Joy in the streets of Baghdad. A war of liberation, but also a war that turns up weapons of mass destruction.” That’s a lot to ask. But then European leaders, more so than American politicians, have a tradition of bucking opinion, of eschewing weather-vane politics. On Iraq, they’re doing so in spades.
