WHY HAS BELGIUM WAFFLED, using its vote in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to block even defensive aid to fellow NATO member Turkey, which borders dictator Saddam Hussein’s Iraq?

This tidy little country has a recent history of being run by France and run over by Germany, the two declining Euro-powers opposing President George W. Bush on this issue.

But many of us expected more from Belgium, longtime home of NATO’s North Atlantic Council headquarters.

The Wall Street Journal speculates that Belgium has demilitarized, its army having become little more than an employment program that puts citizens into spiffy uniforms and bands that play martial music.

"The Belgian army," says Fox News Channel’s John Gibson, "is well known to be too old and too fat to fight anything. It has no interest in going off to war. It employs so many people in do-nothing jobs that it can’t afford any real military equipment anyway."

"The Belgian army," Gibson adds, "is unionized…. Its unions strike for more vacation, higher pay, better perks. Nobody leaves the army because life there is too good, and the union won’t let the government kick anyone out until each person is primed for a fat retirement.

"So if you were wondering why these guys won’t fight or even assume a threatening posture," Gibson continues, "it’s because they’re too old and fat from feeding at the pubic trough…and have trouble enough fighting bad breath, never mind a real enemy soldier."

True as this is, this tiny land where Napoleon met his Waterloo is further debilitated by scarcely being a nation at all. Named for the Belgae tribes conquered by the Romans around 50 B.C., this land was for much of its history merely a part of the Netherlands. Other conquerors – the dukes of Burgundy, the Hapsburgs, the Spanish, the Austrians - put it under separate annexation and imposed Catholicism.

The Congress of Vienna in 1815 at last returned this land to the Protestant Netherlands, but Catholic rebels aided by France and other like-worshipping powers were granted Belgian "independence" in 1830.

Belgium had a brief fling at European colonialism. In 1885 its King Leopold II took at gunpoint the Congo Free State (later Zaire, and today called the Democratic Republic of Congo), renamed in 1908 the Belgian Congo. In the shop windows of Brussels (in Walloon, Bruxelles), you can even today see displays of gorillas and palm trees recalling this brief time of Belgian power and glory (and, say critics, its brutal treatment of Africans used to produce its rubber, ivory and other raw materials).

But Belgium – itself a colony of other European powers for most of its history – showed its military impotence as German troops turned it into an invasion highway to France in World War I and a quick way to end-run France’s brain-dead Maginot Line during World War II.

Today’s Belgium retains the skittish schizophrenia of its history. The nation officially speaks with two tongues, Dutch Flemish in the majority north and French Walloon in the south. But centuries of occupation succeeded in making 90 percent of Belgians Roman Catholic. Taxpayer dollars are used to support Catholic "free schools" in the country.

To understand the psychology of Belgium, visit its most famous tourist attraction in Brussels – the Manneken Pis. This is the bronze statue of a naked little boy, cast by Jerome Duquesnoy in 1619 to replace its ancient stone predecessor.

Many legends give various meanings to the Manneken Pis. The one told to me most often by locals is that this national boy hero, akin to the fabled Dutch boy who reputedly saved Holland by sticking his finger in a leaking dike, saw a small fire that threatened to burn down Brussels and quick-wittedly extinguished it with the only source of water at hand, his own urine.

That’s right – the national hero of Belgium is depicted in the bronze fountain of a small boy expelling a stream of water. (On certain ritual occasions this outpouring of water is replaced by beer. One favorite national beverage is Manneken Pis Belgian White Ale.)

As one French writer describes the Manneken Pis, "his small mischievous, nonchalant, roguish air, rascal, perfectly symbolize[s] the joking mind and the sense of humor of the inhabitants of Brussels."

The Manneken Pis also symbolizes Belgium’s lack of a grown-up hero with the power of manhood.

For those who want to see this greatest glory of Belgium from its tasteless quasi-official website, click here.

At times the locals dress their heroic statue up in humorous costumes, in the same way that King Louis XIV of France symbolically emasculated him (and the Belgians) by providing dresses for the Manneken Pis to wear. Belgium remains France’s sock puppet to this day, as its willingness to block NATO defensive tools for Turkey makes embarrassingly plain.