That's the tendentious title of this article from the English version of Deustche Welle. One almost imagines the poor Eurocrats wiping sweat from their weary brows at all the Yankee war mongering. Frankly, it makes me tired. Read the whole thing, but first strap on a jumbo-sized barf bag.

Taking an unexpected swipe at US President George Bush and his repeated threats against Iraq, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has told a news magazine that he sees no evidence linking Iraq to Osama bin Laden or the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States.

"Unexpected swipe"? To mix languages, I thought that such "swipes" had become de rigueur.

"No evidence has been presented to me that Osama bin Laden?s terror has something to do with the Iraqi regime," Fischer told Der Spiegel.

I'll be generous here (though not further down the post), and assume that Herr Fischer is simply confused. We have never claimed that Iraq was necessarily directly responsible for either bin Laden or 911 (though there were meetings between Iraqi security officials and al Qaeda operatives. In Germany, if you can imagine that).

Of course, before September 11, there was no country that we could claim was responsible for September 11, but if we knew then what we know now, we could have at least had a decent shot at preventing it.

That is the mode that we are in now, with respect to Iraq. Europeans seem to like prophylactics for sex--why do they object to them when it comes to terror?

Saddam has been at war with us for years, albeit ineffectively. So have the Iranians. So have the North Koreans. As have several other countries that the President didn't mention (yet). We are simply finally recognizing that fact.

But what really bothers me is that I can't get over the feeling that, for all the whining about capitalism and our "simplistic" approach that we get from some of these oh-so-sophisticated and subtle European elites, the real concern that they have is that if we take out some of these monstrous regimes, they'll be losing some of their own best customers.

"Allies" - but are they? Against whom?
We do not seem to have a common list of
recognized enemies any more...
What have these "allies" been doing for us,
to justify that "Do not take us for granted"
warning?
To be sure, it would feel nice to have Britain
at our side again in an operation to take out Saddam. If not, well, never mind.
As for the rest of Western Europe, we
may take its irrelevance for granted...