Over the past five years, the continent's politicians have made great capital lambasting the simple-minded crassness of the Bush approach, its doomed belief that the world could be reordered by force. Americans were from Mars, Europeans were from Venus - believers in the gentle suasions of "soft power". Much of that made good sense. But these Venusian Europeans usually conceded that there were times when there was no alternative to military might, albeit deployed for pacific ends. Most European leaders guiltily concede that a properly mandated force could have stopped the massacre at Srebrenica and should have stopped the genocide in Rwanda. The lesson of both those calamities is that sometimes Europe has to use hard power.
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