... hadn't finished ... Quoth Doug, > He said the U.S. might attack Iraq without the UK. Was it a blunder, > or did he really mean it?
I think it was the PNAC mob's knickers showing through. In their ideal world, Uncle Sam would go this alone. Any sharing of the hard yards might lead to pressure for complicated compromises later on, and Wolfowitz's simple (nay, simplistic) plan of unqualified world domination would seem an irksomely unnecessary muddying of the new world order to those too naively arrogant to realise America has frittered away the 'soft' (Nye's term?) component of its power (two centuries worth of brownie points as well as a tide of apre-911 sympathy carelessly binned in the space of half an 'administration'), an irksomely unnecessary complication . It's only Colin Powell and 60 per cent of the electorate who wants those ghastly foreigners sticking their oars in, anyway. It didn't help poor Tory Blur, either. There he is strutting the world stage, being all relevant and stuff, and now it transpires the US don't care either way. Kinda makes his moralistic High Noon routine look a little thin. 'An irrelevant little island's gotta do what an irrelevant little island's gotta do' just doesn't cut it in the context of British politics du jour. Robert Muller's on to something when he announces that there are two superpowers: the United States and the merging, surging voice of the (peace-waging) people of the world. Or so it looks from a distance ... Cheers, Rob.