(Which is not necessarily sillier than the old pipedream of a Federal European state predicated on the hegemony of French bureaucrats, I suppose. My own plan of reunifying the Holy Roman Empire under my own leadership doesn’t seem so silly anymore, by comparison. Although admittedly I have yet to be invited to do a colloquy at the “Chron”, whatever that is.)

Goal 1: Remove the threat of Saddam using WMDs?
My granny could have done that as well as the US army, and she’s dead.
Goal 2: Remove the possibility of Iraq supplying WMDs to terrorists?
Ok, assume that there were WMDs in Iraq. Unless the one-month occupancy managed to destroy all the WMDs, a civil war makes it more likely, not less, that any WMDs will fall into the hands of terrorists.
Goal 3: Remove an odious regime?
Would a one-month campaign have been successful, given that Saddam wasn’t found for six months? Even if it was, how much of an improvement would the succeeding regime have been?
Goal 4: Create a democratic beacon of light and hope, rescuing the poor Iraqis?
Not noticeably successful after 2 years, let alone 1 month.

The US and UK govts publically stated that their goal was not just to get Saddam out of power, but that’s the only job that the army could have done in one month.

It would be interesting to build a model and analyze what kind of world is more stable and less dangerous – unipolar or bipolar.

Or maybe what we need is Orwell’s world with permanent low-intensity war between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. After all, even back in the “peaceful” 1990s every day there were about 1,000 soldiers killed somewhere on the planet and about 5,000 civilians…

…and Iraq shows that the US capacity is bounded at quite a low level.

I’d also note that defence spending is decided democratically, and the only two nations in the EU with serious millitaries are the UK and France. If an EU-wide policy was instituted then how could we be sure that their would be an improvement on the current state of affairs? As opposed to the current situation being dilluted down.

Two superpowers, twice the chance of there being one or more DMMs. If the DMM has a 50% chance of beating the other superpower, there’s no net gain in expected number of people not ruled by a DMM, but still increased likelihood of war.

And that’s ignoring the possibility of a WWI-style war between two non-DMM superpowers.

soru

Belgium, man! Belgium!

There’s a large gap between US policy re independent EU military policy, which has been to thwart it at every available opportunity, and US rhetoric on the same, especially the red meat thrown at the local conservative audiences, which is the exact opposite. Unless this gap is resolved one way or the other, or else explicitly acknowledged in EU defence policy, the ERRF will essentially be NATO-lite, and remain just as ineffective.

The EU’s failure in Bosnia led to attempts to expand capacity to respond to events of this kind, notably the European Rapid Reaction Force. It remains to be seen how effective this will be, but there’s no obvious reason to think it couldn’t handle Bosnia-size emergencies in the future.

What military threat will Europe face in the forseeable future that some combination of France, Germany, and Britain working together can’t easily handle?

And what percentage of Sebastian’s comments (like the first one in this thread) are clearly silly and open to immediate disproof?

I think you should investigate the European difficulties in Bosnia and Kosovo a little bit more unless you count right next door as beyond the limited range.