Grr. I lost a post between last Friday and today about "Old Europe" taking its diplomatic revenge on the Bush Administration, but current events are moving so quickly it's hard to zero back in on yesterday's outrage, so let's stick to the present. Colin Powell and the usual gang of blowhard lawmakers in Congress have worked themselves into a froth about France, Belgium, and Germany's recent attempts to halt or at least delay the United States' headlong rush into its first purely imperial war in over a century (more about that when I get a chance, but I've about had it with America's total amnesia of its late-19th century antics and the last time we tried to put together an empire, the fallout of which we are still dealing with, all these years later!). The three nations were responsible for blocking a NATO proposal that would have beefed up fellow member state Turkey's defenses "just in case" Iraq decided to attack its neighbor during the course of a U.S.-led invasion. Never mind that such a prospect is unlikely in the extreme - Saddam doesn't have the military force to defend his own nation against the American armed forces, so it's unclear as to how he'd have any men or material to spare for a retaliatory foray against Turkey - what the Continent found objectionable was the proposal's implicit presumption that war was already a done deal, and that any ongoing attempts to resolve the standoff between the United Nations and Iraq by diplomatic means were effectively (if not officially) at their end. No one is seriously suggesting that Turkey be left to twist in the wind, but that's how it's being spun here in the States. Already the knuckleheads - among them Representative Tom Lantos (D) of California and Representative Henry Hyde (R) of Indiana, proving that chest-thumping patriotic ignorance knows no party affiliation - are charging the French, the Belgians, and the Germans with ingratitude for all the wonderful things we did for them back during World War Two and the Cold War, as if the debt of having America as an ally comes with some sort of eternal interest attached to it that compounds daily. If that weren't bad enough, now the AP Wire reports that Powell, the pols, the pundits, and the Prez are all claiming that this current rift between NATO allies threatens the very alliance itself. Funny, haven't we been hearing the same exact thing about the United Nations? How juvenile has this nation of ours become, that faced with an otherwise friendly nation who happens to disagree with us on some issue or another, we brand them as traitors, threaten to pull out of all of the ties that bind us, and even refuse to take their phone calls, as actually happened to Germany last fall? Have we forgotten the most basic principle of democracy, that the leaders of other nations (however allied) must in the end answer to their own citizens, and not necessarily kowtow to Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush, or the U.S. House of Representatives? How dare the rest of the world make decisions that might not benefit us, first and foremost! These latest tantrums, both at NATO and the UN, are displaying in vivid Technicolor something I've been shouting up and down for years now - America doesn't give a flying fuck about democracy abroad, only that its friends and allies do what they're told, when they're told to do it, with as little lip as possible, thank you very much. What a surprise that this isn't sitting well with the rest of the civilized world, who have put their faith in the democratic process - at our insistence, mind you! - as the way to peace and prosperity for all nations, only to find that the U.S. prefers democracy at home but tyranny abroad when the chips are down.

Oh, and now we're supposed to believe that Iraq and al-Qaeda are in cahoots, based on a new Osama bin Laden tape urging the Arab world to resist an American invasion and calling upon Iraqis to sacrifice themselves as suicide bombers, if need be. News flash, folks - bin Laden wants this war, at least as much as the Bush Administration, if not more so. Rightly or wrongly so, bin Laden believes that the sight of American troops occupying Baghdad, once the jewel of the Arab world, and definitely a symbol of Islam's former heydey, will finally set the Muslim world off on a global jihad against the West. That's all he's wanted from the start. Idiot commentators are trying to figure out why bin Laden would broadcast such a message on the eve of war, since he must know full well that the United States and its "coalition" (read as: England, Australia, and George Bush's parents) would use it as evidence of an Iraqi-al Qaeda link. Wake up, America! When the enemy of your enemy hands you the other enemy's ass on a silver platter, there's often a pretty damned good reason for it.