France and Germany might be making softly-softly noises, but reading around the US weblog community, I keep stumbling across posts that are either blatantly belligerent, or implicitly so. I don’t know how indicative this is of American public opinion, but the blog world is not known for being dramatically right-wing. Combine that with the impending spring/summer (when weapons designed for the European theatre can reasonably be expected to pack up in the desert), and one suspects the trigger in Bush’s finger is of the hair variety. How nice.
One of the things that interests me is just why we Europeans are (a.) more circumspect about the whole affair / (b.) yellow-bellied shirkers (delete depending on your point of view). Perhaps it’s because most of our countries have done the imperial thing, we’ve had our empires rise and fall, and we’ve seen just how easy it is to utterly screw it all up. Crucially, we’ve seen the mess that’s left behind. Iraq being, of course, a case in point. Former imperial power? Britain. Oops. Sorry about that.
So call me old-fashioned, but I do think it would be somewhat good form to produce a little actual evidence, before attempting to drive tanks into Baghdad. Whether I trust Bush or not is surprisingly irrelevant – thus far, there are only assertions of guilt, and assertions do not constitute evidence. Is that too much to ask?
Meanwhile, I can only hope that the whole thing is a huge great bluff-call – ship enough materiel and troops out there and the guy has to cave, right? Please?