The third reason is the wrong way in which the hypothetical promise has materialised. Let’s admit it: from September 11 until last summer, all the stress was put on Bin Laden, on Al-Qaeda, on Afghanistan. Saddam and Iraq were practically ignored.
Only when it became clear that Bin Laden was in good health, that the solemn commitment to take him dead or alive had failed, were we reminded that Saddam existed too. That he was not a gentle soul, that he cut the tongues and ears of his adversaries, that he killed children in front of their parents, that he decapitated prostitutes then displayed their heads in the streets, that he kept his prisoners in cells as small as coffins, that he made his biological or chemical experiments on them too. That he had connections with Al-Qaeda and supported terrorism, that he rewarded the families of Palestinian kamikazes at the rate of $25,000 each. That he had never disarmed, never given up his arsenal of deadly weapons.
Thus the UN should send back the inspectors and let’s be serious: if 70 years ago the ineffective League of Nations had sent its inspectors to Germany, do you think that Hitler would have shown them Peenemünde where von Braun was manufacturing V2s to pulverise London? Do you think that Hitler would have disclosed the camps of Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Dachau? Yet the inspection comedy resumed. With such intensity that the role of prima donna passed from Bin Laden to Saddam, and the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the engineer of September 11, was received almost with indifference.
A comedy marked by the double games, rather the complicity, of the inspectors and by the conflicting strategies of Bush, who on the one hand asked the security council for permission to use force and on the other sent his troops to the front. In less than two months, 250,000 troops. With the British and Australians, 310,000.
And all this without realising that his enemies (but I should say the enemies of the West) are not only in Baghdad.
They are also in Europe, Mr Bush. They are in Paris where the mellifluous Jacques Chirac does not give a damn for peace but plans to satisfy his vanity with the Nobel peace prize. Where nobody wishes to remove Saddam Hussein because Saddam Hussein means the oil that the French companies pump from Iraqi wells. And where (forgetting a little flaw named Pétain) France chases its Napoleonic desire to dominate the European Union, to establish its hegemony over it.
They are in Berlin, where the party of the mediocre Gerhard Schröder won the elections by comparing Bush to Hitler. And where American flags are soiled with the swastika of Nazi Germany. And where, playing the part of the masters again, Germans are arm in arm with the French.
They are in Rome where the communists left by the door and re-entered through the window like the birds of the Hitchcock movie; where, pestering the world with his ecumenism, his pietism, his Third Worldism, Pope Wojtyla receives Tariq Aziz as a dove or a martyr who is about to be eaten by lions. Then he sends him to Assisi where the friars escort him to the tomb of St Francis, poor St Francis. In the other European countries it is more or less the same.
In Europe the enemies of the United States are everywhere, Mr Bush. There is hate, similar to the one that the Soviet Union displayed until the fall of the Berlin Wall. What you quietly call “differences of opinion” are in reality pure hate. Because in Europe, pacifism is synonymous with anti-Americanism, sir, and accompanied by the most sinister revival of anti-semitism, the anti-Americanism triumphs as much as in the Islamic world.
Do you know why? Europe is no longer Europe. It is a province of Islam, as Spain and Portugal were at the time of the Moors. It hosts almost 16m Muslim immigrants: that is triple those who stay in America. (And America is three times larger than Europe.) It teems with mullahs, imams, mosques, burqas, chadors and don’t you dare protest.
It lodges thousands of Islamic terrorists whom governments don’t know how to identify and control. As a consequence people are afraid, and in waving the flag of pacifism — synonymous with anti-Americanism — they feel protected.
Besides, Europe does not care for the 221,484 Americans who died for her in the second world war, sir. Rather than gratitude, their cemeteries in Normandy, the Ardennes, in Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark and in Italy give rise to resentment.
In other words, in Europe nobody will back this war. Not even nations that are really allied with the US, such as Spain; not even the nations where prime ministers who (like Silvio Berlusconi) call you “My friend George”.
In Europe you have only one friend, one ally: Tony Blair. But Mr Blair, too, leads a country that is invaded by the Moors and hides that resentment. Even his party opposes him and, by the way, I owe you an apology, Mr Blair.
I owe it to you because in my book The Rage and the Pride, I have been unfair to you.