East Is Best: America's friends in Europe, and what they understand.

'What's the easiest way of gaining security and prosperity for our country?" ran the Communist-era joke in Poland. Answer: "Declare war on the United States, and hope that they invade and occupy." Let us hope there is an Arabic version of this joke and that it's being whispered in the coffee houses of Baghdad right now. It certainly helps to explain why the Central and East Europeans have generally expressed solidarity with America in its confrontation with Saddam Hussein.

That solidarity is especially remarkable for being shared not only by veteran anti-Communists but also by their former tormentors. In Poland, for example, the government is headed by Leszek Miller, once a member of the Politburo, now better known as one of eight signatories to the "New Europe" letter published in the Wall Street Journal in support of George W. Bush. Solidarity with America extends well beyond the ruling circles, too. To take just one case: A friend of mine was in Tehran recently, trying to explain to a multinational audience America's reasons for invading Iraq. Amid the barrage of criticism that ensued, only the Ukrainian, Slovak, and Polish participants came to the Americans' rescue. It is also no accident that the first German politician to break publicly with the policy of the Schroeder government was Angela Merkel, leader of the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and an "ossie" -- that is, someone who spent most of her adult life in East Germany.

To some extent, this is counterintuitive. One would expect the people who spent 45 years being fed anti-American propaganda to be more receptive to fresh charges of American imperialism than those who have enjoyed decades of liberty and prosperity under American protection. Indeed, in Russia, according to a recent television poll, 90 percent of the population opposes the war. So why do the Central and East Europeans nevertheless support America, and why has their own skepticism about the war not fed into anti-Americanism? There are a number of reasons.

To begin with, America is drawing on a store of goodwill accumulated over the years thanks to its moral stance against the Soviet Union. You might say America is reaping the dividends of Radio Free Europe, Fulbright scholarships, and Ronald Reagan. Eastern Europeans are more susceptible to the missionary language of George W. Bush today because they themselves were once the beneficiaries of a pro-democracy crusade. Nothing jars on East European ears more than talk of the need to preserve "stability" in the Middle East, because they remember what "stability" meant in their own countries not so long ago -- the stability of a concentration camp.

Second, East Europeans are particularly sensitive to imperious treatment of the kind formerly meted out to them by the Soviets. Jacques Brezhnev -- as the Slav street is now calling the French president -- put his foot in it badly when he suggested that EU candidate countries should have kept quiet on Franco-German opposition to the United States. In Poland, he reinforced an impression of French phoniness going back at least to September 1939, when France failed to act against Hitler in the West even as Poland fought in the East. The effete bureaucracy of the European Union contrasts unfavorably with the American-inspired camaraderie of NATO.

Third, while West Europeans may complain of America's "unilateralism," they themselves practice it towards their poorer cousins in the East. The Wall Street Journal letter came in reaction to a Versailles declaration of opposition to the U.S. that France and Germany had issued without consulting anybody ...