Paul Staines has pointed me at a great article in The Spectator by Bruce Anderson:
The Americans will not be deflected by the absence of support from continental Europe. A few months ago, William Hague asked George Bush how he would deal with European objections to ballistic missile defence. “I’ve got a secret plan,” Mr Bush replied. “What is it?” “I’ll go ahead anyway.” So he will on Iraq.
Anderson explains that Continental European hostility to Bush’s approach to, well, pretty much everything, is rooted in moral relativism and the taint of a Marxist meta-context
They also insist that we live in a world of moral relativities. European governments had a double quarrel with Mr Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech. They do not believe in the axis. Nor do they believe in the evil. They prefer to live in a world as depicted by Whistler, in which everything is a subtle symphony of endless grey. From this perspective, Saddam may be a bad man, but he is merely a darker shade of grey than Ariel Sharon.
The leaders of Europe preside over powerful modern economies and complex societies, all of which are rendered impotent by fundamental philosophical flaws in the very epistemology of their ruling classes.
