Victor Davis Hanson continues to eschew diplo-speak and tell it like it is, in a piece about the moral derangement of Europe: Let Europe be Europe.

Beware of punditry now assuring us that, because we have seen the error of our ways and are now penitent, Europe is back on board. A contrite Mr. Bush — his critics imply — now seeks to smile more like Reagan and bite his lip like Clinton, and drop the old, scary “dead or alive,” “Old Europe,” and “smoke ‘em out” lingo.

All this spin hides the real problem, which has nothing to do with Bush. The ethicists of Europe don’t want to see success in Iraq, since it might be interpreted as a moral refutation of their own opposition to Saddam’s removal. So let us in turn stop begging old Europe, NATO, and the EU to participate in the rebuilding or policing of the country. To join or help, in the collective European mind, would be to suggest that an emerging democracy far away was worth our own sacrifice to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. Liberating Iraq, shutting down Baathist terror, and establishing consensual rule, after all, was a dangerous — and mostly Anglo-American — idea, antithetical to all the Europeans have become.

Understandably, they do not want to be lumped in with the “missionaries of democracy” who evoke the ire of terrorists or the disdain of oil-producing grandees. They do not wish to forgive the debts run up by Saddam Hussein for their overpriced junk. And they most certainly are not willing to do any favors for Texas-twanged George W. Bush, whom they hope will be gone in less than six months. All this is not their world, which operates on self-interest gussied up with the elevated rhetoric of the utopian EU — appealing to an Al Gore’s Earth-in-the-Balance mindset rather than to serious folk who worry about genocide and mass murder.

So there are reasons our alliances cannot simply be glued back together again, and they transcend neo-con zeal and Bush as el Loco cowboy. Europeans, aside from a few tiny brave countries and courageous individuals, will no more participate in the “illegal” action in Iraq than they did in the “approved” and “legal” Afghanistan intervention, where about 7,000 NATO troops now help a postbellum liberated population of 26 million. Even if we sent Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Jesse Jackson as an obsequious trio, the Euros would not act in a resolute, muscular way.