Eric Margolis

DOSVEYDANYA, BORIS NIKOLAYEVITCH

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin’s lavish funeral in Moscow last week leaves one with a sense of sorrow and mixed emotions. Yeltsin certainly deserves a place in history for bringing down the rotten Soviet Union, though his humiliation of its leader, the well-intentioned but hapless Mikhail Gorbachev, was brutal.

Yeltsin almost didn’t survive the 1991 anti-Gorbachev coup. As I learned from KGB sources, the commander of KGB’s elite Alpha Group who had been sent to assassinate Yeltsin refused to order his men to shoot. Yeltsin survived to become Russia’s first elected president and he was hugely popular – for a time

At first, there was widespread optimism that Yeltsin might somehow produce a viable democracy and free markets in this long-suffering nation, so horribly ravaged first by Stalin, then Hitler.

Tragically, Yeltsin failed both counts. Instead of democracy, the new Russia got chaotic politics resembling tribal warfare. The ideal of free markets quickly vanished, as robber barons, gangsters, and former intelligence men – more often than not all in cahoots- pillaged the economy. A tiny elite grew fabulously wealthy while ordinary Russians suffered cruel privation as their pensions vanished and prices for basics of life soared.

Under Yeltsin, much of Russia’s foreign and economic policies fell under American influence. Washington flooded Yeltsin’s Russia with new $100 dollar bills which became, in effect, the nation’s real currency. Russians bitterly complained their nation was under `external management.’

In the late 1980s, I was the first western journalist invited into KGB headquarters at Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison. Long hours spent with senior and mid-ranking reformist KGB officers in Moscow allowed me to understand and report back the shape of things to come.

KGB’s elite First Directorate, charged with foreign intelligence, was composed of the cream of Soviet society: young, highly-educated, sophisticated, westernized, multi-lingual officers. The men of the First knew better than anyone, including the sclerotic Communist leadership, that the Soviet Union and Communist Party were totally rotten and nearing collapse.

In 1989-1990, I was advised KGB had decided to abandon the party that it had been created to defend, save itself in the impending national ship wreck, and seize key sectors of government and the economy. As one KGB general told me, `we need a tough dictator like South Korea’s Park Chung-hi or Chile’s Pinochet to make our lazy people work – at gunpoint if necessary.’

After 1991, KGB, nominally split up into FSB(domestic) and SVR(foreign intelligence), went into business. It worked against the Party, and relentlessly undermined Yeltsin’s attempts to produce a viable democratic government while putting `retired’ KGB men in key positions in government and industry. During the Yeltsin years, former KGB men occupied around 47% of senior government posts.

In 1994, the Muslim Caucasian state of Chechnya, with only one million people, declared independence from Russia. Yeltsin reacted savagely, sending in heavy bombers and artillery to shell Grozny, capitol of the tiny nation. Russia’s attempts to crush Chechen freedom left 100,000 Chechen civilians dead and the tiny country destroyed. After more bitter fighting, the fierce Chechen defeated the Russian Army and drove it out.

Yeltsin’s slaughter of 10% of the total Chechen population was one of the worst war crimes of our era. President Bill Clinton actually lauded Yeltsin as `Russia’s Abraham Lincoln’ and helped finance Yeltsin’s brutal war against Chechnya. The Bush Administration would later shamefully brand Chechen independence fighters - the children of Soviet concentration camp survivors - `Islamic terrorists.’

Russia was engulfed by crime and runaway corruption. Surrounded by mediocrities, thieving officials, and his rapacious extended family, Yeltsin steadily lost control in spite of huge secret American cash subsidies. He ordered the Russian parliament building shelled by tanks after a group of anti-Yeltsin nationalists barricaded themselves within.

Drinking far too much, and suffering from worsening heart disease, Yeltsin was almost unable to serve his second term. KGB/FSB dirty tricks added to Yeltsin’s growing image as a drunken buffoon. Meanwhile, in a sordid scene reminiscent of post-World War I Germany, foreign financers and carpetbaggers poured in to join the plunder of Russia’s state assets.

On New Year’s eve, 1999, the `security organs’ ousted Yeltsin in a palace coup. The official version was that Yeltsin had resigned. Former FSB director, Vladimir Putin, became Russia’s new president. Putin was the antithesis of Yeltsin: sober, efficient, decisive and respected.

Putin was boosted into office after 300 Russians were killed in mysterious apartment building bombings in 1999 blamed on Chechen `terrorists.’ In his fascinating book, `Blowing Up Russia,’ former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who was recently murdered by means of a radioactive isotope in London, claimed the bombings were a false flag operation conducted by FSB and gangsters designed to provoke a new war against Chechnya and deliver a mortal blow to Russia’s dying democracy.

By 2007, former KGB and GRU (military intelligence) officers had come to occupy 78% of all senior posts in government and industry.

The predictions I had heard from members of the KGB back in 1988 and 1989 had finally come to pass. President Vladimir Putin, with an approval rating of 70%, had become Russia’s most popular leader, the strongman on a white horse that KGB and most Russians had so long been craving.

The flow of Russian history was back on its traditional course. Like the post-1917 Revolution’s liberal Kerensky government, Boris Yeltsin’s experiment was a curiosity and aberration, the last tainted and unlamented vestiges of which were interred last week with his body.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

WRITER’S NOTEBOOK

3 May

*Half of France 44 million voters watched the TV debate last night in Paris between presidential contenders conservative Nicholas Sarkozy and socialist Segolene Royal. In my view, Sarkozy came out looking more presidential - which he always does. Royal is a nice lady but French want a king, not a soccer mom. Still, many viewers thought the debate a draw. There was no `I knew Charles DeGaulle, Madame Royal, and you're no Charles DeGaulle.' My hunch is that Sarkozy will win. But as noted earlier, I'm not keen on either candidate. France's presidency demands a regal-looking figure. Chirac, with his physical stature and sonorous voice, was perfect. So would have been the dashing, patrician Dominique de Villepin. The leader of France is expected to have style and chic.

*Kudos to the Toronto Globe & Mail newspaper for exposing Canada's involvement of the torture of prisoners captured by Canadian forces in Afghanistan. More about this soon.

2 May 2007

*Turkey's Supreme Court, an arm of the `deep government' that really rules Turkey, just bared its claws and blocked election of that nation's very able Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, for being `too Islamist.' This fake court really speaks for the so-called `secular' elite that has ruled Turkey since the 1930's: the army, industrialists and big landowners, moneymen, and the state bureaucracy.
The `secularists' are also trying to prevent parliament from changing election of the powerful president from appointment to a popular vote, and reducing his term from seven to five years.
The ruling AK party, led by PM Recep Erdowan, is now calling for a national election. The army brass are threatening the fifth coup since WWII. Keep watching. Turkey could blow wide open. It badly needs a major revolution to once and for all get rid of the lingering influences of 1930's state fascism.

*All the world wonders if Rupert Murdoch will succeed in buying Dow Jones & Company. One thing is for sure: the Wall Street Journal's editorials and slanted news can't go any further to the extreme right. So even if Godzilla Murdoch manages to buy the influential ideological paper - the Pravda of Republican businessmen - its editorial policies will likely remain the same. Murdoch's growing empire, which includes the Times of London, the New York Post, much of the Aussie media, and Fox news has become the Ministry of Truth of the hard right.

*Got to hand it to the Israelis. When it comes to truth-finding commissions, they don't fool around. This week, the Winograd Commission blasted PM Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Peretz for totally bungling last year's disastrous war in Lebanon. The commission all but called it an outright defeat. Olmert, Peretz, and former chief of Staff Halutz ended up looking like the Three Stooges, Olmert's party rival, former senior Mossad official Tzipi Livni, a favorite of the Bush Administration, lost no time in calling for his head and selflessly offering herself as the new party leader. I wish we could see similar red-blooded investigations in Washington instead of the shameful whitewashes we've so far seen over 9/11, Iraq, Abu Ghraib and torture. Time for glasnost and perestroika in George Bush's Washington. .

***

April 30 2007

**Watching former CIA Director George Tenet bluster his way through an interview last night on the CBS show `60 Minutes’ left me queasy and angry. CIA officers have long complained Tenet was a yes-man and sycophant, always ready to kiss the hand of whoever was in power.

Tenet played a major role in facilitating George Bush and Dick Cheney’s naked aggression against Iraq and misleading Americans into war. Tenet now stands to profit from a $4 million book advance for his self-serving memories. Disgusting. This revenue should go to help wounded GI’s. A group of former CIA officers rightly blasted
Tenet as `the Alberto Gonzalez of the intelligence community.’ It’s hard to think of a worse insult. Gonzalez, who has long played Sancho Panza to George Bush, wrote the administration’s legal briefs justifying and permitting torture.

*Fascinating events afoot in Turkey. What’s known as the `secular establishment’ is desperately trying to block the highly respected current moderate Islamist foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, from being elected president. A powerful combination of government bureaucrats, western-oriented city dwellers, and Turkey’s `deep government,’ the army and security forces, are trying to undermine the moderate, pro-European Gul. At the heart of this increasingly dangerous confrontation, marked by brazen threats of a coup by rightwing army generals, is fear that if Gul becomes president, he will purge the army of its quasi-fascist, anti-Islamic generals and threaten the economic power of the industrial monopolists who back them. This is not about headscarves for women: its about raw power and big money.

*Last year, this column warned that if Canada got more deeply involved in Afghanistan its troops would end up being brutalized and increasingly involved in human rights violations. This, alas, has come to pass. The ignorant politicians and blowhard generals who led Canada into the Afghan morass have just `discovered’ that prisoners captured by Canadian troops are being handed over to the Afghan government’s brutal secret police, a leftover from the Communist days, for horrible tortures and abuse. Canada’s hands are now as dirty as the Communist-backed regime in Kabul that it foolishly supports. Good work, Conservatives.

*High drama in France. Conservative Sarkozy is about 5% ahead of Socialist Royal in the polls. But how will the former supporters of the moderate Francois Bayrou vote? That will decide the election. Supporters of far right, Vichyite Jean-Marie Le Pen are all going to Sarkozy. Too bad Bayrou can’t replace Royale.

French rightly voters feel they are faced with two poor choices. My solution: I offer myself as candidate for President de la Republique! My platform is simple: 1. government subsidized two-hour lunches with wine for everyone. 2. The guillotine for anyone who bakes the kind of fake, industrial baguettes increasingly found in France made from frozen dough that are a crime against humanity. 3. Tax deductibility of mistresses. 4. Five years in prison for tailgaters and speed freaks, rude waiters, surly car rental personnel, and officious bureaucrats. 6. A ban on fat foreign tourists in shorts from central Paris. 7. A return to smoking everywhere, particularly restaurants and cafes. 8. Sending all strikers to Devil’s Island. 9. Invading Belgium. 10. Rearming and modernizing the Maginot Line forts.
Voila! I await the republic’s call. Vive la France.

***

FRANCE’S ELECTION: BACK TO THE PAST

France’s first round of presidential elections on Sunday was billed as a dramatic leap into the future. It was, to an extent, but, paradoxically, it was also a giant leap backwards into a not so happy past.


Unlike 2002, when France’s left split its votes among fringe candidates, leaving far right National Front Leader Jean Marie Le Pen facing conservative Jacques Chirac, this time around leftwing voters heeded warnings not to `throw away’ their votes and backed the mainstream Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal.

On Sunday, French returned to their traditional voting pattern between left and right, giving rightist Nicholas Sarkozy 31%, and Royal 26%. The two victors will face one another in the final election, two weeks hence.

The biggest surprise in this election in which an unprecedented 85% of French voted, was the diversion of support for the far right. Le Pen won only 10.5% of the vote instead of the 20% many had expected. Large numbers of his supporters clearly decamped to Sarkozy’s conservatives, drawn by the former interior minister’s increasingly tough line on immigration and suburban crime, and his quite open hostility to Muslims.

France’s political life has been marked for the past century and a half by the profoundly bitter struggle between left and right. In 1940, France’s right – the bourgeois middle class, the upper class, industrial elite, military and the Church – saw the Communist and Socialist labor unions and intellectuals, and their Popular Front government, as a greater threat than Hitler’s Germany.

Stalin virtually controlled France’s left. He had just murdered six million Ukrainians, and a similar number of `anti-state elements’ and `capitalist wreckers’ in the USSR.
The Soviet gulag held millions of prisoners five years before Hitler opened his first concentration camps. Many French (and the Papacy) thought they were next and turned to Nazi Germany as a savior from Communism. Stalin, not Hitler was the real enemy of Europe and the Church.

This left-right blood feud continues to this day, albeit more discreetly and without recourse to violence. French society remains deeply split into the productive right, which earns the nation’s wealth, and the left, which spends it. Given that over half France’s GDP is spent by government, socialism has become permanently embedded in the national fabric, and will probably be impossible to seriously reduce without a real revolution.

So the left-right battles of 1848, 1871, and the 1930’s are back. There is precious little meeting ground or compromise between left and right as each represent constituents whose interests seem set in permanent antagonism.

But Sunday’s vote also created a fascinating wild card, namely the amiable Francois Bayrou, who got 18.5%. His small, centrist Union for French Democracy, squarely occupies France’s seriously shrunken political center. Bayrou advocates moderate reform programs that do not upset the cushy lifestyle and most benefits so beloved by French.

Bayrou’s voters and those who backed Le Pen and the fringe candidates of the left amount to 43% of the total electorate. How will this mass of marooned voters act in the next round of elections? So far, Bayrou has refused to throw his support to either Royal or Sarkozy. The leftists fringe candidates are heartily backing Royal and her Socialists, putting her neck-a-neck with Sarkozy in May.

This leaves Bayrou’s bloc as the decisive force and king (or queen)-maker in the next vote. Furious politicking is going on behind the scenes as Bayrou comes under mounting pressure to give his support to Royal. Though many French voters say they have little confidence in her, even more fear just how far right Sarkozy would take their nation and alienate its immigrant population, which now numbers 5 million, or 10% of the population. `Anyone but Sarko’ is the new rallying cry of the left and center-left.

Sarkozy promises major change; Royal promises mostly more of the same. It’s a pity for France that these two distant poles of her politics cannot at least compromise on some sensible reforms that will safeguard the nation’s social security net, excellent health care system, and high standard of infrastructure and government services while freeing labor markets long fettered by medieval restrictions, breaking the power of extortionist farmers, and slashing red tape.

France’s sluggish economy badly needs a triple dose of Cognac to liven it up and release that nation’s great productive energy. French cannot much longer get away with their derisory 35-hour work week, 5-weeks paid vacations and innumerable holidays, nor full pensions at 59 or 60. Not when Chinese are working 18 hours a day, seven days a week.
China is now even plunging into serious wine-making. Nothing, it appears, is sacred any more.

The solution to France’s current economic `malaise’ is a little more work and a little less play. Not violent Marxist revolution nor black shirts marching down the Champs Elysée. Compromise s’il vous plait, worked out over a fine, traditional two-hour lunch with some bottles of very good Bordeaux.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

THE ENDLESS WAR

The death last Sunday of six Canadian soldiers in southern Afghanistan reminds us of Santayana’s famous maxim that those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.

The soldiers were killed near Maiwand, a name meaning nothing to most westerners. But there, on 27 July, 1880, during the bloody Second Afghan War, the British Empire suffered one of the worst defeats in its colonial history.

Two years earlier the Raj (Britain’s Indian Empire) had invaded Afghanistan for a second time. The British put Afghan puppet rulers into power in Kabul and Kandahar.

Ayub Khan, son of Afghanistan’s former emir, rallied 12,000 Pashtun(or Pathan) tribal warriors to fight an advancing British force whose mission, was, in London’s words, to `liberate’ Afghan tribes and bring them `the light of Christian civilization.’ Today, the slogan is `promoting democracy.’

The fierce Afghan tribal warriors routed the imperial force, composed of British regulars, including the vaunted Grenadier Guards, and Indian Sepoy troops, after a ferocious battle. The British army doctor Conan Doyle used as his model for Sherlock Homes’ companion, Dr. Watson, fought at Maiwand.

I recall this epic Afghan victory against British colonialism because understanding today’s war in Afghanistan requires proper historical context. A century and a quarter after Maiwand, Pashtun warriors of southern Afghanistan continue to resist another mighty world power and its allies, who have been faithfully following the imperial strategy of the old British Raj.

The invasion of Afghanistan was marketed to Americans as an `anti-terrorist’ mission and effort to implant democracy. It was sold to Canadians as a noble campaign of `nation-building, reconstruction, and defending women’s rights.’ All nice-sounding, but mostly untrue.

What we are really seeing is a war by western powers seeking to dominate the strategic oil corridor of Afghanistan, directed against the Pashtun people who comprise half that nation’s population. Another 15 million live just across the border in Pakistan. What we call `Taliban’ is actually a loose alliance of Pashtun tribes and clans, joined by nationalist forces and former mujahidin from the 1980’s anti-Soviet struggle.

Last year, a leading authority on Afghanistan, the Brussels-based Senlis Institute, found Taliban and its allies control or influence half of the nation – roughly equivalent to Pashtun tribal territory. Its study flatly contradicted rosy reports of military success and `nation-building’ from Washington and NATO HQ.

This week, the same think tank issued a shocking new survey based on 17,000 interviews. `Afghanis in southern Afghanistan are increasingly prepared to admit their support for Taliban, and belief that the government and international community will not be able to defeat the Taliban is widespread..’

Senlis’ study concurs with my own findings in South Asia that Pakistan and India have independently concluded NATO will eventually be defeated in Afghanistan and withdraw. The US, however, may stay on and reinforce its 30,000 troops there because it cannot admit a second defeat after the Iraq debacle.

US and NATO are not fighting `terrorists’ in Afghanistan and they are certainly not wining hearts and minds. They are fighting the world’s largest tribal people. The longer the westerners stay and bomb villages, the more resistance will grow. Such is the inevitable pattern of every guerilla war I have ever covered.

Western troops stuck in this nasty, $2 billion daily guerrilla conflict will become increasingly brutalized, demoralized and violent. This is precisely what happened to Afghanistan’s second to latest invader, the Soviet Union.

Afghanistan’s figurehead Karzai regime controls only the capitol. The rest of the country is under Taliban, or warlords who run the surging narcotics trade that has made NATO the main defender of the world’s leading narco state.

If 160,000 Soviet troops and 240,000 Afghan Communist soldiers could not defeat the Pashtuns in ten years, how can 50,000 US and NATO troops do better?

Those generals and politicians who claim this war will be won in a few short years ought to study Maiwand.
30 MARGOLIS

ROAD TO DAMASCUS

President George Bush charges that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s trip last week to Syria was undermining US foreign policy. He’s absolutely correct.

If ever there was an administration whose foreign policy needed undermining, it’s the Bush/Cheney diumverate. The House and Senate do not traditionally take a lead in foreign affairs, except, of course, for assisting Israel, but these are extraordinary times and extraordinary measures are needed.

Speaker Pelosi, the third ranking government official, and a remarkably capable lady, is doing all Americans a service.

The republic’s founding fathers were deeply worried a future president might run amok or make himself an absolute ruler. The primary constitutional architecture of the US government is designed to thwart such dangers through a brilliant system of checks and balances. Problem is that King George III’s reincarnation in the White House and his servile Republican flunkies in Congress have combined to undermine this vital mechanism.

Congress was created as the premiere branch of government to express the voice of the American people. Its leaders have the duty and every legal right to intervene when they see the executive branch leading the nation over a cliff and repeatedly violating the Constitution, be it at home or abroad.

Nancy Pelosi was quite right to ignore Bush’s narrow-minded refusal to talk to Syria. She went to meet President Bashar al-Asad in Damascus. Interestingly, Pelosi was joined by some of the leading members of the pro-Israel lobby in Congress.

Whether she was carrying secret messages from Israel to Syria remains a question of considerable debate. But the US Congress, dominated as it is by lobbies aligned with Israel’s right wing parties, is a vital player in Mideast politics, and should have an active voice in any moves towards peace.

Pelosi arrived in Damascus at a crucially important moment. The Arab League just unanimously reaffirmed its historic offer to Israel of full recognition and permanent peace in exchange for a withdrawal to Israel’s 1967 borders, sharing Jerusalem, and some kind of compensation or resettlement of 4.5 million Palestinian refugees. This is essentially the same plan proposed to Bush by the respected Iraq Study Group in Washington.

Never has Israel and its neighbors been closer to peace. In fact, before expanding its borders in the 1967, Israel would have jumped at such an offer. But instead of backing this dramatic opening, Bush and Cheney have been busy preparing to launch an air war against Iran, and have pressing Israel to attack Syria and Lebanon. Pelosi’s opening to Syria comes at this crucial moment.

The need for Congress to alter the direction of Bush’s ruinous foreign policies were shockingly displayed in a recent BBC/University of Maryland survey that should be required reading for every American.

Surveying 26,000 respondents in 25 different nations, the study (that included Americans) found the dominant view was US is playing a `mainly negative’ role in the world. Two thirds believed the US military presence in the Mideast is stoking conflicts.

Most shocking, when respondents were asked which nations posed the greatest danger to world peace, or were most negatively regarded, the answer was a new `axis of evil:’ Israel, the United States and Iran.

Horrid North Korea came just ahead of the USA. This is appalling, considering the hundreds of millions the US government spends annually promoting its image abroad.

The world’s most respected nation was Canada - constant target of scorn by US conservatives - followed by France, Japan and the European Union.

This shattering report is about much more than a popularity contest. When the United States, not long ago regarded as a beacon of liberty, human rights, and democracy around the globe, finds itself most disliked, along with Israel and Iran, it’s time for the alarms to go off.

It is precisely this surging worldwide anger against the US, notably over Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Bush’s refusal to join the fight against global warming, that is fueling the violent anti-American groups westerners call `terrorists.’ America’s image abroad has become a vital function of its national security.

The Bush/Cheney Administration’s aggressive Darwinian policies, and Bush’s lamentable persona, not only power anti-Americanism everywhere, they have, ironically, restored and reinvigorated leftwing parties around the globe.

It’s too soon to tell if Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Damascus bears fruit. But her visit came at the clear demand of America’s majority that voted in the Democrats to make this disaster-prone administration change course. For the outside world, Speaker Pelosi at least offers a seeming antidote to Bush and Cheney and a reminder that the American government has not entirely fallen into the hands of ideological extremists.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

*******
Once again, I must address the "comment" section of this website. Two contributors have been banned as their comments degenerated into personal attacks and racial slurs. This kind of commentary will not be accepted and should it continue, I will close the comment section permanently.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EUROPE

NEW YORK - In 1945, when I was two years old, FBI agents barged into our Florida home and arrested my beloved French governess, Mlle Chapuiseau, as a `Nazi spy.’

With the typical dimness of government security agents everywhere, the FBI reasoned: Mlle Chapuiseau was from Alsace. That bitterly disputed province had been occupied by Germany from 1940-1945. She was now in the USA. Ergo she was a Nazi spy.

No matter Mademoiselle Chapuiseau was as French as Joan of Arc. The poor Alsatians had involuntarily changed French and German nationality four times from 1871 and 1945.

I recall this lady because I’m soon off to greet France’s glorious spring in beautiful Alsace and Lorraine. Each spring I visit the Maginot Line’s great forts and the frontier battlefields where millions of French and German soldiers died in three major wars.

The greatest miracle I have ever seen is today’s French-German border. Nothing now demarcates this long-disputed frontier, over which so many fought and died. This blood-drenched border that evoked such madness and violence has almost vanished. You only know you’ve crossed the border by seeing billboards in French or German.

France and Germany have truly become brother nations.
If these old foes can achieve fraternity and genuine mutual respect, there is hope for other seemingly irreconcilable groups like Arabs and Jews, Armenians and Turks, Sri Lankans, Indians and Pakistanis, and even the crazy Cypriotes.

This month marks the 50th birthday of the European Union. Almost everyone these days criticizes the EU. It’s horribly bureaucratic and bloated, filled with paper-passers, redundant layers of unresponsive government, and silly arguments about cheese or the size of buttons.

Much of the union’s time goes to squabbling over trivia or translating boring speeches no one reads into Estonian and Slovenian. Its 27 member states can’t seem to agree on anything except more meetings. The core EU economies, France, Germany and Italy, are stagnating. Unemployment is far too high, though France’s is actually dropping a bit. Regulations and overly powerful unions stifle growth and innovation. Huge EU farm subsidies are an outrage.

The EU has expanded too far, taking in new East European members that are a generation away from being prepared to join western Europe. The Union has no unified armed forces and nebulous foreign policy. Many Europeans are fed up with EU and yearn to return to the old Europe. In 2005, French and Dutch voters made the EU a punching bag for all their grievances and worries by voting turned down its proposed new constitution.

Amidst all the criticism and grumbling from EU citizens, and sneering scorn from Americans and Britons(who benefit from membership when it serves them, but often pretend they are not really EU members), let’s recall the union’s rarely cited, under-appreciated, but quite remarkable accomplishments.

A recent, 26,000-person survey by the BBC of 25 nations found the most respected nations on earth were, in order, Canada, France, and Japan. The much maligned European Union came next.

Among the EU’s major accomplishments: The well-managed Euro, now the world’s second reserve currency and a refuge from the sinking US dollar. Stringent green regulations that make Europe the world’s leading defender of the environment. In some European nations, a permit is now required to cut down a tree.

The EU has become the world’s leading defender of human rights, international organizations and international law, putting the erstwhile champion, the United States, to shame. The EU leads the world in defending the rights of animals and has made major strides combating the evils of industrial factory farming, animal testing, and the barbaric fur trade.

Preservation of historic buildings and quarters, embellishment of public spaces, and strong support for art and culture are hallmarks of the EU. So, in western Europe, is excellent medical care, reliable public transportation, safety and cleanliness of its streets, and care for unemployed, helpless, and aged. Some call this socialism; I call it good, humane, responsive government.

Europe’s greatest triumph has been to rid itself of mankind’s greatest evil, nationalism. The EU has restored Europe to its former role as the center of western civilization, culture, and good taste.

Fifty years in the great sweep of history is nothing. The task of somehow politically, economically, militarily and legally unifying 27 nations from Portugal to the Black Sea will take generations. Critics are expecting too much, too fast from the EU. So far, the EU has made enormous and commendable progress in a relatively short time.

In spite of all your problems, dear EU, a very happy birthday to you.
30

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007