Peace Archive- Timothy Garton Ash

For where the threatening Soviet East once united us, the Middle East divides us. We are now repeating, on a larger scale, the mistake we made in the Balkans for most of the 1990s: Western states that don't have fundamentally different interests in a region nonetheless pursue different policies there.

Or can you explain to me how the vital interests of France, Germany or Britain in the Middle East differ from those of the US? Remember that several of the al-Qaeda terrorists who struck on September 11 started out in Hamburg. The Arab and Muslim world is where the "war against terrorism" will be won or lost.

Americans and Europeans have an overwhelming common interest in seeing democracy, peace and prosperity spread through the Middle East - not least, so that Israel is one day physically connected to the West by a patchwork of Islamic or post-Islamic democracies.
This means handing back Iraq as soon as possible to the Iraqis and supporting their federal or confederal democracy. Then, and urgently, it means trying to make progress toward secure, viable states of both Israel and Palestine.

One unintended consequence of the war on Iraq is that this can no longer wait. The Palestinian question is now, for the Arab and Muslim world - and for many Europeans - the litmus test of whether the Bush Administration means what it says about liberating and democratising the Middle East rather than occupying and colonising it.

A genuine project of democratisation also involves helping to make Iraq's neighbour Turkey worthy of membership in the European Union. In countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, it means supporting reform, and perhaps ultimately what I have called refolution, that is, the mixture of reform from above and people's power from below that triumphed in Poland and Hungary in 1989.

In all these places, we need to listen to the people in the countries concerned, as we did in central and eastern Europe during the Cold War. Now those Poles, Hungarians and Czechs whom we helped to liberate are themselves fully part of the West and ready to join us in doing for and with the oppressed of the Middle East what was once done for and with them.
At the moment, Europeans and Americans don't even see the threat the same way. During the Cold War, Berlin always felt itself to be more directly threatened than New York; now it's the other way round. I have no doubt that the collapse of the twin towers on September 11, 2001, was the true beginning of the 21st century.

The combination of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, whether by rogue states or rogue groups, is one of the greatest new dangers to all free countries. Americans have woken up - been woken up - to this in a way that most Europeans have not. Europe has not yet had its September 11.

There is both hypocrisy and an ostrich-like head-in-the-sand quality about much European discussion, or non-discussion, of these issues. Criticising America, Europeans sometimes are, as Kipling famously put it, "makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep".

The American-led war on Iraq has not helped to make Muslims, especially Arab Muslims, feel welcome in the West. Sensitivity to the wider impact of what will be seen as an Anglo-American neo-colonial occupation of an Arab land is not cowardice; it is a necessary weapon in the long-term war against terrorism.

Europeans also tend to have a different analysis of the threat, one that pays more attention to the political causes of Islamist terror and, in particular, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Palestine is the great symbolic cause of the Arab-Muslim world, repeatedly embraced by Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the whole Arab League and the "Arab street" - hypocritically, perhaps, but nonetheless effectively.

Many Europeans feel that giving the Palestinians a viable state could be a bigger contribution to winning the war against terrorism than deposing Saddam Hussein.

We Europeans, for our part, are worried by a tendency among conservative US Republicans to celebrate and to exaggerate American power. In particular, they exaggerate America's capacity to deploy that power effectively outside existing alliances and international institutions. This hyperpower unilateralism seems to us a real departure from the post-1945 tradition of American foreign policy. It's yielding to the temptation that flows from finding yourself as the sole superpower after the end of the Cold War.

Do you really believe you can win the war against terrorism by military and police means alone? You can win the war against an established state like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but you can't win the peace this way. We've been seeing that on the streets of Baghdad since Saddam's fall.

To emerge ultimately victorious in the broader "war against terrorism", it is the peace we have to win, first in Iraq, then in the wider Middle East.

To win the peace, we have to get the symbolism right. That unforgettable scene when an American soldier draped the Stars and Stripes over the head of the giant statue of Saddam, then hastily took it off, has fatally marred the "fall of the Berlin Wall" moment at the end of this war.

The Pentagon seriously proposed that a former head of the CIA should become information minister in the new occupation administration. It also seems to me it would be a crass mistake not to try the Saddamite mass murderers under international law. Don't let them plausibly accuse you of "victors' justice". For heaven's sake, ask the United Nations to establish a special tribunal for Iraq, as it did for Yugoslavia.
Even the US, now the most powerful country in the history of the world, cannot manage this process on its own. Militarily, yes, but not politically. Two Anglo-Saxon powers are not enough; adding Australia just makes it three WASPs in a desert. Ah, you may say, but that's not all: Washington claimed support in the Iraq war from 45 countries. Who needs France when you have stout Micronesia at your side?

As for Europe, we are told that the US can manage just fine with a combination of Tony Blair's Britain, Jose Maria Aznar's Spain, Silvio Berlusconi's Italy and what Donald Rumsfeld calls "new Europe" - that is, the new democracies of central and eastern Europe that will shortly be joining the European Union. Now this is a serious point for the future of the West, seriously wrong.

My old friends in the post-dissident political elites of central and eastern Europe today are generally more pro-American than their French or German counterparts. They are grateful to the US for its support in their struggle for freedom; some are still worried about Russia; they believe in the trans-Atlantic community of values, about which Vaclav Havel has spoken so well. Their publics and some of their political successors are already less sure.
As these countries are integrated into the European Union, they will probably identify more with Europe. Above all, though, their message to Washington, on the one side, and to Paris and Berlin on the other, is "Please don't ask us to choose between you!" They are right. Let me say this as emphatically as I can: the West will include France and Germany, or the West will no longer exist.

It's odd that this should need restating, but France is one of the classic lands of Western liberty, or as the French once put it themselves, liberte, egalite and fraternite. France remains the second most important military power in Europe, after Britain. No serious European policy can be made without it.
During the disastrous diplomatic prelude to the Iraq war, some Americans may have wished that Churchill had never succeeded in persuading Roosevelt to give France a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. But Churchill was right: the Europe we want cannot be built without France. So Washington should not indulge in the old imperial pastime of divide and rule. A divided Europe is not in our interest or yours.
A more united Europe and a less arrogant United States should work together with all the peoples of the Middle East to do for them what we did with and for the peoples of Middle Europe during the Cold War. This can be our trans-Atlantic project for the next generation.

Here's how we put the West together again. Shall we talk about it?

Timothy Garton Ash, a follow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and the Hoover Institution, Stanford, is writing a book about relations between America, Britain and Europe. A longer version of this article appeared in yesterday's New York Times Magazine.