IT HAS been rightly noted in literally hundreds of articles that the Iraq debacle has underscored not just the specific incompetence of the Bush Administration, but has revealed, more generally, the built-in failings of the neoconservative movement itself. Lost in neoconservatism's colossal crash is the fact that two other, far more successful European ways of working with America also withered in Iraq's aftermath, leaving the transatlantic relationship without a coherent modus operandi.
SINCE THE Suez crisis of 1956, when the United States humiliated (rightly, in my view) its colonial allies Britain and France, these two leading European powers have come to embody the dueling methods of dealing with their difficult American ally. Both Britain and France proceeded from Suez with the strongly held view that the Eisenhower Administration had been wrong to stop their efforts to humble Nasser's Egypt. From that supposed mistake, both London and Paris feared that, left alone, Washington would continue to make such grievous errors. However, in setting a template for how to deal with America, the French and British came to diametrically opposed views.
