The wages of bullying

My former colleagues David Rivkin and Lee Casey, in the Washington Times, on why the Bush administration was wise to reserve the principal contracts for Iraqi reconstruction to bidders from countries that supported the war effort. Rivkin and Casey point out that the key element in the ultimately unsuccessful French and German effort to obstruct our freedom to act in Iraq was the attempted bullying of less powerful European countries such as Poland. Recall that Chirac essentially told the “new European” countries to “shut up” when they dared speak in favor of supporting the U.S. and taking action against Saddam. Chirac now can ill-afford to watch these countries benefit, at France’s expense, from having resisted his bullying. We, by the same token, can ill-afford for these countries not to so benefit.