Yes, Europe does have a long history of screwing up and I’m sure they learned some lessons from the experience. That hardly qualifies them to lecture the rest of the world on how to do things any more than a recovering drug addict makes a good role model for temperate behavior.

WWII was largely caused by the gross stupidity of European diplomats and politicians. Even when they clearly had the strength to stop Hitler in his tracks long before he invaded Poland, they lacked the courage to do so. They stabbed a friendly nation in the back with the Munich Pact, a betrayal that ended up costing them dearly about a year later.

Starting in 1940, Americans began sending aid to Europe, first in a trickle and later in a torrent with Lend-Lease. Even before Pearl Harbor, American Navy ships were escorting British convoys in a clear violation of our declared neutrality. A U-boat sank at least one ship, the destroyer USS Reuben James before we had even entered the war. During the war, a couple hundred thousand American servicemen were killed and countless others wounded freeing Europe from its own stupidity.

Since the end of WWII, Western Europe has depended on the US spending billions each year for your protection. Not only did we spend billions rebuilding Europe with our Marshall Plan, throughout the Cold War, fully 1/3rd of our annual defense budget went to pay for the protection of Western Europe. Over those decades, the cost of that defense would total several trillion dollars and quite a few lives.

I spent two years serving in Europe and quickly grew tired of Europeans on the one hand saying "Yankee go home" and at the same time demanding we clean up their messes like in the Balkans. Let the European countries pay for their own defense for a while. If one piss-ant Balkan country attacks another, let Europeans spend their own blood and treasure on the problem. It's time for Europe to grow up.

I doubt I'm the only American that feels this way. European condescension wears thin pretty quickly. The fact of the matter is that some nations are engaged in evil acts. The old Soviet Union was indeed an "Evil Empire" and they knew it. Despite the howls from Europeans and like minded Americans, plain language can often get results.

Hiding behind diplomatic wuss-speak solves nothing in the end. For example, far from undermining Iranian moderates by lumping them into the "Axis of Evil", many are comforted in their battle against the hardliners and even members of the Iranian Parliament are asking for an investigation of Bush's charges. In the meantime, a Muslim-European summit is long on platitudes and short on reality.