Stardate 20030420.1822

(On Screen): Agence France-Presse, in its ongoing efforts to tell the home-folks that France is in trouble, but not very much trouble, reports on the fact that the US doesn't seem willing to forgive-and-forget and may be going to engage in vendetta against France, among other places in NATO. But don't worry, be happy; there isn't really anything to worry about. France is ultimately too central and too important to really be depth-charged in this way.

US hawks may be gunning for France over its opposition to the Iraq war -- but options to "punish" Paris at NATO are limited, unless they want the Alliance to collapse, diplomats say.

One thing this war has been forcing us to do is to ask the unaskable, and question deep assumptions. Some allies are being revealed as inimical, and we're finding friends in unexpected places.

So let's ask an unaskable question: Why is the US still a member of NATO? Why does NATO even exist any longer?

NATO was created for three reasons. In theory, it was a mutual defense pact. In theory, it was a formal pledge by all member nations to raise their militaries for war in case any member nation was attacked. Article V of the NATO charter, if invoked, was supposed to mean that the entire alliance would fight against whomever had made the attack.

NATO as a practical matter had two other purposes. First was to prevent, through deterrence, any attempt by the Soviet Union to invade and conquer western Europe. Second was to prevent yet another resurgence of German militarism, which was seen as having been the proximate cause of two World Wars which had devastated Europe prior to the formation of NATO.

As a practical matter, the solution to both of those was American military occupation of western Europe. In principle Article V was written to be symmetrical, but in practice its purpose was to give the US a legal excuse to get involved in any local war which broke out in Europe, whether across the Iron Curtain or between nations of western Europe.

In other words, the purpose of NATO was to get the US to impose peace on Europe, because the Europeans couldn't do it for themselves, and to protect Europe from the USSR, because the Europeans couldn't do that for themselves either. And it worked, too. (A demonstration of this unspoken purpose of the alliance is the fact that the top military commander of NATO is invariably from the US. The Secretary General can come from any nation, but the commander is always American.)

America participated because it didn't want to see another World War fought in Europe. While the damage and cost to the US in each of the other two World Wars had been much lower than for any other major power, it was still significant after America reluctantly became involved each time. And since another World War was likely to involve nuclear weapons, the cost to the US the next time was liable to be much greater than the half million dead we lost in WWII. That price was already frighteningly high. So the US participated in NATO for decades, and maintained large military forces in Europe, so as to prevent yet another conflagration. It was expensive and difficult but ultimately cheaper than the alternative.

NATO was intended to prevent an invasion of western Europe by the Soviet Union. There no longer is any danger of that, since there is no longer any Soviet Union to make such an invasion, and no such external threat exists now.

NATO was intended to prevent another war in western Europe, especially one involving Germany. That, too, no longer seems to be a danger. The political and cultural situation has changed radically there; the German militarist tradition is gone now, especially since the Prussians are no longer in charge, and the chance of a new war between France and Germany seems negligible.

NATO was a mutual defense pact, where all members would rally when any member was attacked. After the attack against the US in September of 2001, NATO actually did invoke Article V for the first time in its history.

And except for the UK, no one did anything because of it, or at least no one did anything helpful. Rather than rallying for war, as those who wrote the NATO treaty had expected in such a case, and committing their armies and navies to fight along side ours, they tried to use the invocation of Article V to prevent the US from fighting back. The mutual-defense pact had somehow been transformed into a mutual-surrender pact. In the aftermath of 9/11, rather than being a bulwark of our defense, NATO became one of the diplomatic stumbling blocks attempting to prevent us from removing the danger we faced. After voting to invoke Article V, our most vocal "allies" have spent that year and a half doing everything in their power to hamstring us, and have actually used the invocation of Article V as justification for doing so.

That perverse reading of Article V went as follows: Article V says that "an attack against one shall be treated as an attack against all." Since Article V had been invoked, that meant we had all been attacked, and thus we all had to agree on how to respond to it. Therefore no American military plan could be put into effect without unanimous approval from the members of NATO, even if that plan exclusively involved American forces.

None of the purposes for which NATO was formed are still justifiable. NATO is of immense value to a lot of European nations, to this day, but it's no longer c