"Iraq was too fast"

The EU's ambassador to the US, John Bruton, was the subject of two long interviews over the weekend. One in the Boston Globe and the other in the San Francisco Chronicle. One thing Bruton said to the Globe struck me.

Bruton said the rift on Iraq, in both its suddenness and perceived scope, was as much a function of different policy-making systems as political or ideological differences.

"Policy is made at the top in the US. The president takes a position and that's it," he said. "It takes much longer for a policy to emerge in Europe. Some EU countries supported the administration, others didn't. . . . The EU countries can reach an agreed position on most things as long as we have enough time to do it. Iraq was too fast."

What exactly is he saying here? At first I thought he was just spouting more "rush to war" stuff, but now I think this was really from his Europhile heart. Bruton believes in the EU. He'd like to see the EU take command of defense and foreign policy issues away from the national governments and that, I think, is where the "Iraq was too fast" is coming from. To Bruton the divisions within Europe and the inability to agree a single policy is evidence that the EU must have one voice on these issues.

Advocates for local government will find it this quote from Bruton ironic:

"While the EU is democratic, people don' t have the sense that they can change the government the way they can change the mayor of Boston or the mayor of Dublin," he said.

The mayor of Boston is, of course, a real executive with real authority where the Lord Mayor of Dublin is virtually powerless and elected annually by the members of the city council, who themselves are virtually powerless and are elected (generally) every 5 years.