Wish I had more time to get into this thread, but the day job has been keeping me pretty busy lately. So just a few random thoughts, and apologies for throwing them in rather like hand grenades in what is up to now a reasonably temperate thread, but I suppose that my resentment about Bush's treatment of the rule of international law has reached boiling point.

As far as I have read, Saddam's real hero is Stalin, the ally whom the West tries to ignore when it talks WWII up into a crusade of good against evil. Sure Hitler was evil, but Churchill was above all concerned to preserve as much as he could of the British Empire, and went along with Yalta which consigned several generations of Central and Eastern Europeans to slavery.

US sentiment after both World wars was that traditional European diplomacy and power politics were the root of all evil, and Wilson after WWI and Truman after WWII were both instrumental in establishing the League of Nations and the UN as attempts to replace power politics and militarism with the rule of international law.


Neither the LoN nor the UN was perfect, but both were a step in the right direction, and provide a basis for progress. Yet it seems to me now that the US has now just about got to where Europe was in Summer 1914: spoiling for a fight, and forgetting what war is really like - even though its own civil war was the first real modern war. The ultimatums to Saddam are also reminiscent of the way Austria kept changing its ultimatums so that war became inevitable, thus revealing that war and not meeting the terms of the ultimatum was and is the real objective.


And a footnote on the Bushies' disgraceful behaviour in relation to the International Criminal Court: by rejecting and undermining it, they are retrospectively giving credence to the neo-Nazi view that the Nuremberg tribunal was, after all, just "victors' justice".