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WELCOME BACK, EUROPE
The scheduled partial U.S. troop withdrawals from Europe were long overdue; some of us had become shrill and hoarse in calling for them over the past few years. It was not just that there was no longer any conventional enemy on Old Europe's borders, or that the new hot points are further to the east, or even that in terms of a cost-benefit analysis it made no sense stationing traditional army divisions roughly where Patton and Hodges ended up 60 years ago.The real significance, inasmuch as many airbases and depots will stay, is symbolic and psycho-sociological. Unwittingly, we had created an unhealthy passive-aggressiveness in Europe that clinicians might identify as a classic symptom of dependency. Europe — now larger and more populous than the United States — has reduced defense investment to subsidize a variety of social expenditures found nowhere in the world. So insular had its utopians become under the aegis of NATO's subsidized protection that it was increasingly convinced that the ubiquitous United States was the world's rogue nation, the last impediment to a 35-hour work week, cradle-to-grave subsidies, and wind power the world over. Posted by: tipper 2004-08-20 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=41089 |