Back of the French government are the French people, and all the inductions are that they are against this war, so long as there is any way of making sure that Saddam doesn't have these weapons of mass destruction. And the same goes for the German government.

And the same goes for the people in the United Kingdom and Spain and Italy and Poland and the Czech Republic, and virtually all the countries that have governments that are currently lined up with Bush.

And it's not about oil concessions because most of these countries don't have any. It's about countries where the people have had some experience of having wars fought in their territories, and air-raids in their cities. And that carries on a couple of generations.

In some ways we find it easier in this situation to identify with ordinary people in Iraq than we do with ordinary people in America, who have never had to live with that. When I read a story in the paper where a man in Iraq said that when the raids came he'd probably stay in his house rather than go into the shelter, it might have been my mother talking.