BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

How the US set a course for war with Iraq (Quentin Peel, Robert Graham, James Harding and Judy Dempsey, May 26 2003, Financial Times)

In the first week of January, when most of the Paris elite was still on the ski slopes, a top French diplomat delivered a blunt warning to his boss at the foreign ministry in the Quai d'Orsay. Gerard Araud, director of strategic affairs and security, told Dominique de Villepin that the US administration was absolutely intent on going to war in Iraq.

"We seem to be acting as though we believe the train has not left the station," he told the foreign minister. "In fact, it has already departed. All we are doing is lying down on the tracks in front of it." France, he added, must choose between finding a diplomatic way of supporting the inevitable war and preparing for outright opposition.

Mr Araud, a close observer of Washington politics, sounded his alarm just three days after George W. Bush had addressed US troops preparing to leave for the Gulf from their base at Fort Hood, Texas. "We are ready," the president declared, in the ringing tones of a leader all set for war.

The realisation that war in Iraq was inevitable was not universally shared in Europe. In London that week, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, declared that the odds were 60 to 40 in favour of a peaceful diplomatic solution. In Berlin, the German government was still clinging to the hope that the process of weapons inspections launched by the United Nations Security Council in November would avert any need for military action.

How is it that Americans are always accused of being less sophisticated than Europeans and of not understanding political realities as well as they, yet even in January of this year the Euroipeans hadn't figured out yet that George W. Bush was going to take Saddam out? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 28, 2003 12:09 PM