Glad to see someone trying to take a positive approach, and sorry if I drift OT, it's just that the opinions being expressed on the war crimes thread drive me crazy.

Wilfried, you're a step in the right direction, but you're still talking about people having one big army rather than two middle-sized ones, and the politico-military version of Say's law states that armies create their own enemies. Now that the Russkies aren't coming across the North German Plain anymore, the Arab/islamic World has been drafted to provide a new threat.

The terrorism of 11 September isn't amenable to military action, it requires working on the grievances which gave rise to it. But Bush, who didn't want to tackle either Saudi Arabia or Israel where these grievances largely lie, had an army and had to find an enemy against whom to fight a war. Hence the bombing of Afghanistan and the creation of a new Vietnam in which he thinks he can use Blair's ground troops as his very own montagnards. Good news for the women of Afghanistan, who are no more than fortuitous collateral beneficiaries of the war, but does anyone believe that the women of Saudi Arabia are liberated?

The French game plan for European politico-military cooperation seems to be based on the realisation that they haven't the resources to run such a policy on their own anymore (Indochina, Algeria, Suez..), but by sidling up to the Germans they can use Germany's economic and military influence to "punch above their weight" as the British like to call their own behaviour in maintaining as much as they can of the influence which they first achieved by widespread militarism and disregard of human rights, sovereignty and other such trivia in the service of mercantilism.

West Germany, to its credit, is regrettably the only country which has really learnt the lessons of the history of the 20th century, and my biggest fear is that under Schröder the "Wir sind wieder wer" (we're someone important again) mentality will lead to that honourable record being contaminated and Germany being drawn into supporting unwarranted initiatives in the name of Europe, rather than Germany's renunciation of militaristic adventurism influencing its partners. So I'm not too keen on this European Army stuff, even though I'm an official in the European Commission. To me it's just a vehicle for "collective unilateralism" rather than genuine multilateral action.

And now - at last - my positive suggestion. The only way forward is to make the UN more effective, as it is the only guarantor of the rule of law in relations between nations. That means supporting it with adequate resources (unlike the fiascos in Rwanda and Srebrenica) to back up the consensus of the nations of the world and the protection of human rights.

I'll keep my bile about Sharon's insult to the highly-regarded Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (not a politician, but a lawyer who has won many cases on behalf of deprived people in national and international courts) for another thread.