Portrait of a Lost War

I had been wondering what the US military was actually doing in Iraq these days.
Not very much, I think. The Americans military seens to be playing a static, zero-sum game, hoping that no one in Washington notices their lack of progress.
Recent news stories about US soldiers have talked about how some never left their Iraq bases at all. And I haven't noticed any stories anymore about military types - or anyone else for that matter -- going around constructing schools or hospitals or rebuilding electrical substations or water works. They're doing busywork like staffing checkpoints to protect the Green Zone in Baghdad, and they're operating huge prisons, and they're trying to keep the airport open. When American bases are fired on by insurgents, they still seem to be sending out expeditions to try to find the attackers, and they also still seem to be undertaking occasional patrols, though as described by even the cheerleading embedded reporters, these patrols don't seem to have much purpose. In general, it has been my impression that the American troops are hunkered down in their bases and aren't making much progress on anything in Iraq.
This Guardian story confirms that scenario -- Under US noses, brutal insurgents rule Sunni citadel

. . . There is no fighting here [in Haditha] because there is no one to challenge the Islamists. The police station and municipal offices were destroyed last year and US marines make only fleeting visits every few months . . . A year ago Haditha was just another sleepy town in western Anbar province, deep in the Sunni triangle and suspicious of the Shia-led government in Baghdad but no insurgent hotbed. Then, say residents, arrived mostly Shia police with heavyhanded behaviour. 'That's how it began,' said one man. Attacks against the police escalated until they fled, creating a vacuum filled by insurgents. Alcohol and music deemed unIslamic were banned, women were told to wear headscarves and relations between the sexes were closely monitored. The mobile phone network was shut down but insurgents retained their walkie-talkies and satellite phones. Right-hand lanes are reserved for their vehicles. From attacks on US and Iraqi forces it is clear that other Anbar towns, such as Qaim, Rawa, Anna and Ramadi, are to varying degrees under the sway of rebels. In Haditha hospital staff and teachers are allowed to collect government salaries in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, but other civil servants have had to quit . . . DVDs of beheadings [of accused 'spies'] on the bridge are distributed free . . . One DVD features a young, blond muscular man who had been disembowelled. He was said to have been a member of a six-strong US sniper team ambushed and killed on August 1. Residents said he had been paraded in town before being executed. The US military denied that, saying six bodies were recovered and that all appeared to have died in combat. Shortly after the ambush three landmines killed 14 marines in a convoy which ventured from their base outside the town. Twice in recent months marines backed by aircraft and armour swept into Haditha to flush out the rebels . . . the insurgents withdrew for a few days and returned when the Americans left . . . their strategy appears to be to wait out the Americans, calculating they will leave within a few years, and then escalate what some consider the real war against a government led by Shias . . . The constitution talks, the referendum due in October, the election due in December: all are deemed collaboration punishable by death. The task now is to bleed the Americans and destabilise the government. Some call that nihilism. Haditha calls it the future.

What a pointless excuse for a war this has turned into. And the biggest betrayal is this -- those Iraqis who believed in America and supported the troops and tried to work in the new regime are the ones now being shot or beheaded by the insurgents -- just like Vietnam, eh?

Columnist Carlos Pietri, at V Headline (a Venezuala electronic news service) writes about Rumsfeld's recent visit -- and it looks like Rummy has been making himself just as well loved there as he is in the capitals of Europe. In a column entitled 'Not Chavez, Castro or Morales who undermined US influence in Latin America' Pietri says

. . . Definitively his stupidity is so great that he does not see what is evident to every one: the true causes of the Bolivian crisis was the influence of the United States in the region ... they have promoted poverty, war, corruption, drugs trafficking, historical injustice, exclusion and especially the displeasure of the Bolivian people . . . It is evident that President Chavez "has influenced" the people of Bolivia, but not to destabilize it or to promote some king of illegal activity, but to encourage Mr. Morales to fight for the well-being of his people, in which I do not see anything wrong . In Latin America, the United States has had bad antecedents through supporting dictatorial regimes if they favor of their USA interests. The United States has always forgotten that they will gain more by policies of rapprochement rather than promoting divisions ... that help offered must be directed to the interests of the needy and simply not to their own greed. The "proof" that Rumsfeld said exists on Cuba and Venezuela influencing the situation in Bolivia is as nebulous as the "intelligence" relating to the existence of arms of mass destruction in Iraq. . . . Will Rumsfeld not be thinking about a possible invasion of Bolivia ... or Venezuela? It's clear that Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, and Condoleezza are only interested in continuing to rob Bolivian petroleum and gas ... THAT is the real subject ... anything else is pure lies and falsification. . . . I reiterate, it is not Chavez, Castro or Morales who have undermined the influence of the United States in Latin-America ... it has been the immorality of the people who govern the country of the north.

Revealed at last: the "American Chickenhawk" Policy

NOW I get it.
The 101st Fighting Keyboarders got it all along, while the progressive bloggers did not.
And no wonder Bush can't meet with Cindy Sheehan.
Bush said in his radio address today "if we do not confront these evil men abroad, we will have to face them one day in our own cities and streets . . . the safety and security of every American is at stake in this war . . . " and he continued with the newest American buzzwords: "By advancing the cause of liberty in a troubled region, we are bringing security to our own citizens and laying the foundations of peace for our children and grandchildren."
In other words -- as long as Afghanistan and Iraq are battlefields then the Unites States itself will not be. Iraqis and Afghans must fight so that the security of the United States will be protected. Their men, women and children must die so that Americans don't have to. Casey Sheehan and 1800 other American suckers were collateral damage to the main goal, trading tens of thousands of 'Haji' lives for American ones. Bush is waging an illegal war in the Middle East so that Americans can stay home and stay safe.
All those young republicans and upper-class American twits who won't sign up for military service have got it exactly right -- why should they waste their their beautiful minds on something like that?
This policy will make sure that all Americans are just like Bush and Cheney and Rummy and Wolfie and Condi -- chickenhawks.
Hey, reminds me of a song:
There ain't nobody here but us chickens
There ain't nobody here at all
So quiet yourself,
And stop your fuss
There ain't nobody here but us
Kindly point that gun,
The other way
And hobble, hobble hobble off and
Hit the hay. . .

Good, bad, ugly

Good.

Non-Sequitur

Bad

Cam Cardow, Ottawa Citizen

Ugly

Brian Gabel, Globe and Mail

Iraq in 7 acts - its a one-way trip

I love the Smirking Chimp. I don't know where they find this stuff, but it is a terrific daily round-up of lots that is important or interesting or funny.
For example, this article today by writer Rich Procter: 'Iraq: A drama in 7 acts (4 down, 3 to go)'

Act One - The Glorious National March to Victory!
Act Two - Things Go Wrong
Act Three - Turning Points that Aren't
Act Four - "Oh Shit" Moments Mushroom
Act Five - Sickening Realization that We've Already Lost. Panic. Dread. Denial.
Act Six - Call Defeat "Victory", Get the Hell Out
Act Seven - Blame, Demonize and Punish the Innocent, Reward the Guilty

Here's how he describes Act Five, where, he says, the US is today:

Presidential poll numbers tank. "Hoo-Yah!" War Hawks begin issuing measured statements in the passive voice ("Mistakes have been made. Tough choices cloud exit scenarios. New approaches are being considered.") Members of the President's own party inch away from him, fearing collateral damage. The most deluded Hawks fall back on the ultimate piece of political boilerplate, "We must win because we can't afford to lose" (without revealing how we achieve this miracle.)

And for all of you too young to remember, this is exactly what happened in Vietnam, too. Proctor finishes the article by saying

Any chance we can head off another decade of war? Another 10-20,000 deaths? Not
with War President "Never Made A Mistake, Won't Change Course, Everything's
Hunky-Dory, Get Outta My Driveway, You Peaceniks!" As Edward G. Robinson said in
"Double Indemnity," (We've) "got to ride this streetcar to the end of the line,
and it's a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery."

Getting out

In her demand for real answers, Cindy may also have inspired a new focus on realism about Iraq -- as shown by these two major posts today.
This is why I read Eschaton:

. . .conventional wisdom of 'liberal hawks' and 'liberal not hawks' regarding Iraq is basically about the same. We need to get out. The latter emphasize the importance of 'getting out now' while the former epmhasize 'getting out as soon as we can subject to things being better in some undefined way,' but the positions aren't really so different. The 'hawks' are just more wedded to the idea that we have to be able to 'declare victory' while the 'not hawks' think that little chest beating is not actually all that important. But, none of these people are George W. Bush. As we know, but no one talks about, we have no intention of getting out now or ever . . . .It's time for the Biden Democrats, in one of the infinite Sunday show appearances, to raise the issue of the administration's long term intentions in Iraq. If the stubborn George W. Bush intends to leave troops in that country forever, then no talk of getting out, either on a rigid or flexible timetable, is relevant.

And this is why I read Kevin Drum:

. . . they [he's talking about some liberal hawks], and many people like them, keep telling us that we need to stay in Iraq even though they seemingly agree that no one has a credible plan for accomplishing our goals there. This doesn't make any sense. Either you believe that there's a way we can win in Iraq — a real way that involves the leadership of George Bush and his staff, not some fantasy scenario in which he suddenly turns into the reincarnation of FDR — or you don't. And the only reason to stay in Iraq is if you think we can win . . . no one, neither Democrat nor Republican, has presented a convincing plan for winning in Iraq under the present circumstances. The insurgency is not going to give up, the Army doesn't seem to have any kind of consistent commitment to using counterinsurgency techniques against it, we don't know for sure that they'd work anyway, and let's face it: the track record of major powers beating large-scale overseas insurgencies is close to zero in the past half century. So what's the plan? I happen to think a timed withdrawal is probably the best bet left to us, although I admit that I suspect Iraq is going to end up in chaos no matter what we do. That would be a disaster, but if we can't stop it anyway there's no point in making things worse by staying. For now, that's pretty much where I'm at, and anyone who disagrees really needs to give the chin scratching a rest and tell us clearly and concisely what they'd do differently to turn the tide in this war. Time has run out.

I cannot tell you the number of useless, pointless articles and editorials I have read in the last three years which went on and on about how, if Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney would only do W, X,Y and Z in Iraq, then everything would work out just fine.
The trouble was, the W,X,Y, and Z solutions always involved things that nobody in the Bush administration had any intention of doing -- like turning the occupation over to the UN or solving the Israeli/Palestine problem or letting the Iraq government decide for themselves whether they wanted American troops to stay or not. It was great today to see both Atrios and Drum demand that people start demanding real answers -- and from the Bush administration, not from the Senate minority leadership and Michael Moore.

And just when George was likely driving down the road to see her!

Cindy Sheehan had to leave her antiwar camp this afternoon to go to her ill mother.
Quick, cue the batmobile -- so the right wingers can now say that Bush WOULD have talked to her if she had just BEEN there.

If we don't remember the past, are we doomed to repeat it?

The CTV headine says CMA supports parallel, private health system, the Globe says CMA backs private care, and the CBC headline reads CBC News: Doctors support parallel private health system at CMA meeting in Edmonton> Now, I didn't think that the doctors themselves were really quite as definite as these headlines imply, and indeed the CBC story also reports that the incoming Canadian Medical Association president Dr. Ruth Collins-Nakai said the motion "merely reflects a recent Supreme Court decision, which upheld the right of Quebecers to turn to private health insurance if the public system fails them."
But when headline writers can so blithely write off the public health care system, it does indicate that our beloved system is losing the public relations battle.
These headline writers, and reporters, and I think most of the doctors too, likely do not remember a time when medicare was not available.
I do. Or, at least, I remember the doctor's strike in July of 1962 in Saskatchewan. I was a teenager at the time, and I remember how scared we all were without doctors. And a baby died of meningitis because his parents couldn't find a doctor to care for him. I remember my parents, both CCFers, talking about how important it was that the government hold fast and keep up the fight.
According to a doctor in Prince Albert, who was one of the few at the time who supported medicare, the first summer medicare was in force he saw dozens of people with medical conditions they had neglected for years, because they couldn't afford a doctor and had been too proud to ask for charity.
We need to remember all of this -- how painful and dangerous and humiliating it was to be unable to afford a doctor; and how hard it was to bring medicare into existence. We simply cannot loose it just because we take it for granted now.

Cindy leads the way

New York


Nebraska


Kansas City


Portland, Oregon


Los Angeles


Las Vegas


Washington


Jackson, Miss.


Milwaukee


Philadelphia


Durhan, North Carolina


Pawtucket, Rhode Island


Notice how many of these protesters were my age and older?
Like I said before, it's the parents who are leading the anti-war movement this time. We now know a bright shining lie when we hear it.

All we are saying is give peace a chance

An AP story which, for a change, gives sympathetic coverage to anti-war protests: Vigils Calling for End to Iraq War Begin"More than 1,600 vigils were planned Wednesday from coast to coast by liberal advocacy groups MoveOn.org Political Action, TrueMajority and Democracy for America. A large vigil was also planned in Paris . . . Some 200 people joined a peace vigil in Cincinnati's Fountain Square. Demonstrators softly sang "Give Peace A Chance" and lined one side of the square with signs, drawing honks of support from some passing motorists."

It was all Poland's fault!

In The Steam is turned on Rigorous Intuition has created a brilliant and chilling post.
He quotes William Shirer's journal entry for August 10, 1939:

How completely isolated a world the German people live in. A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today reminds you of it. Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland over Danzig, here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is being maintained. (Not that it surprises me, but when you are away for a while, you forget.) What the Nazi papers are proclaiming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion, and so forth. This is the Germany of last September when the steam was turned on Czechoslavakia. For perverse perversion of the truth, this is good. You ask: But the German people can't possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do.

RI then notes that Shirer also said most Germans were opposed to the war, feared it, and didn't really expect it to come. But it came.
As RI points out, it only takes a few people in key positions to make a war happen, regardless of how insane a misadventure it seems to everyone else. "I've seen nothing to suggest that real men no longer want to go to Tehran."

And now for something completely different

Ok, lets lighten up! Here, just for fun, is the Yawn of the Tiger:

Enormous, mendacious, disembodied . . .

The Poorman is the funniest person on the internet, left OR right. On Sunday, the internets rocked with his "Lying asshole" tune -- he created it in response to right-wing blogger John Cole calling him a lying asshole because he defended Cindy Sheehan after RedState's calling her a media whore -- follow that?
Anyway, just sing this to the tune of “Kokomo”:

Enormous, mendacious, disembodied anus
You rectum, fifth column, objectively pro-Saddam
Half-Swedish, pro-moorish, deceptive chocolate starfish
On the internets
There are lying assholes
And they say I said all these things I never said at all
Dead body in the sand
If his mom don’t like it she’s a “media whore”
Hey don’t you dare get mad
It’s just a metaphor!
You lying asshole
CHORUS
Ooo I really hate those lying assholes
They say I’m all talk
Because I won’t go to the recruiter
That’s cuz I’m fighting on my computer!
Lying assholes
Nine eleven, a little slice of heaven
Guantanimo Bay
Is a luxurious get-away
Eat lemon chicken in the Sun all day
They call me a wingnut
Because my party bashes faggots
I’ve got an answer for that:
Michael Moore is fat
Lying asshole
CHORUS

And then today he writes The Parrot Sketch :

When the Bushies should have been putting together a national security strategy, they decided to put on an ad campaign for the war. (This is an administration, after all, that has Karl Rove crafting policy.) Fortunately for them, none of their supporters understand the ass-elbow distinction between policy and talking point, so, even though the case never got much penetration into the wider public, it was enough to get the war started. But, as time drags on, and the casualties and costs keep mounting, the ad campaign is starting to feel a bit hollow. (Why, then, was the war fought? Good question. Really, really, really good question. Go hang out with Cindy Sheehan down in Texas and maybe the President will deign to give you an honest answer. But pack your big suitcase.) The American public was sold a dead Norwegian Blue nailed to its perch. The people who sold it to them have endless excuses for why it's not really dead - and have you noted the beautiful plumage! - but they are starting to reach levels of absurdity that even the most gullible and trusting among us can recognize as bullshit. Cindy Sheehan is banging the parrot's stiff corpse against the counter, screaming in its ear, and about to reel off a very long list of synonyms for 'dead'. This war is an ex-parrot.

Just a small war, really

One thing we must all remember is this -- you don't need many troops to fight a nuclear war.
In 'Social Security Lessons' Krugman identifies two looming Bush iniatives: Iran, and tax cuts. He thinks tax cuts are on the horizon but about Iran he blithely writes: "Despite the tough talk about Iran, I don't think [Bush] can propose another war - there aren't enough troops to fight the wars we already have."
But you don't need troops to fight Iran, not really -- all you need are bases close enough to allow quick, decisive and massive bombing runs, using small, tactical nuclear weapons to utterly destroy as much as possible of Iran's military capacity and uranium enrichment facilities.
Now we have those bases built in Iraq.
As discussed in a comment thread downstream, I think America would have used nuclear weapons against Hanoi to "win" in Vietnam except that the strength of the anti-war movement at that time in the US convinced the armed forces leadership and Nixon that they could never get away with this.
Now we have the Bush administration, who don't care what anyone does, says or thinks.
So the stage is set, just waiting for a script, and a cast and crew.
At the end of July, we had a short but scary note in Pat Buchannan's American Conservative magazine, when former CIA agent Phillip Giraldi describes the main elements of the script -- how Cheney has decided that the next terrorist attack on the US will be the excuse for an attack on Iran:

The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack - but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

Nice to know that so many senior military officers put their own careers ahead of hundreds of thousands of lives, isn't it?
Anyway, the information about the cast and crew is contained in a rather odd publication called the Executive Intelligence Review, where self-described intelligence expertJeffrey Steinberg notes that on inauguration day Cheney had appeared on the Imus show: "Using language identical to his earlier lies about Iraq, Cheney accused Iran of pursuing "a fairly robust nuclear program" and of sponsoring terrorism. "That combination is of great concern," he declared, warning that Israel could be expected to launch preventive bombing attacks on Iran's alleged nuclear weapons sites, if the Iranians don't abandon those supposed nuclear efforts." Steinberg also notes a number of other relevant events:

[In November, 2004] Dr. Jerome Corsi, a leading player in the Karl Rove-inspired dirty-tricks apparatus known as Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, suddenly emerged as the new head of the Iran Freedom Foundation (IFF), promoting regime change in Tehran. Corsi was touted by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) as being the driving force behind the Iran Freedom and Support Act of 2005, which calls for $10 million in funds to be handed out to Iranian dissident groups . . . In March 2005, Corsi published another propaganda book, Atomic Iran, peddling scare stories about Iran's imminent possession of nuclear bombs. From May 15 to May 18, Dr. Corsi led an "Iran Freedom Walk" from Philadelphia to Washington, where a rally was addressed by neo-con Richard Perle, and where Corsi was congratulated, in a written statement, by Dick Cheney. In April 2005, Regnery Publishing, Inc. released another fractured-fairy-tale propaganda piece, promoting pre-emptive war on Iran, this one by Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.). Sources familiar with the book report that Weldon was snookered by ex-CIA Director and leading neo-con war party operative James Woolsey, and self-proclaimed "universal fascist" Michael Ledeen, into buying fake intelligence, pushed through a former Iranian minister under the Shah, who has more recently been a business partner of discredited Iran-Contra gun dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Representative Weldon concealed the identity of his high-level "source," referring to him only as "Ali." But "Ali" was soon identified as Fereidoun Mahdavi, a former commerce minister, who fled Iran shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and never looked back. In an interview with The American Prospect's Laura Rozen, Mahdavi professed shock and outrage that his "information" had formed the basis for Weldon's shrill book. He confirmed that all of the information he passed on to the Congressman had, in fact, originated with Ghorbanifar, a notorious disinformationist, and Iran-Contra ally of the Washington neo-cons. Weldon's saga with "Ali," as recounted in his book, Countdown to Terror-The Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America ... And How the CIA Has Ignored It, began in March 2003, at the very moment that the Bush-Cheney regime was about to launch its Iraq invasion. In late June of this year, Kenneth Timmerman, a propagandist for the neo-cons and for right-wing Israeli circles around former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, published another book, Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran, which makes a string of preposterous claims, all based on information provided by the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an Iranian exile group on the U.S. State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Timmerman asserted that: Iran was behind the 9/11 attacks; Iran is safehousing Osama bin Laden inside the country; and Iran has all of the elements to produce nuclear weapons, and possibly provide them to terrorist cells already infiltrated into American cities.
When the Timmerman book was published, the Washington Times ran three days of excerpts, along with an editorial touting the book and calling for action against Iran. If all of this sounds remarkably similar to the propaganda run-up to the Iraq invasion of March 2003, that's because it is. The same Michael Ledeen/Richard Perle/Dick Cheney circles that brought you Operation Iraqi Freedom, are aggressively pushing war against Iran. But this time, with 170,000 American troops bogged down in Iraq, Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, et al. are now pushing their decade-old plan to conduct pre-emptive nuclear strikes.

Horrifying, isn't it. And what would the world do? Is there any way to stop this madness?
Just how much can anti-war supporters in the US expect Cindy Sheehan do all by herself?

Look foolish and leave

It's pretty clear now that the US is just trying to declare victory and leave. But the more Bush babbles about defeating the terrorists and all that, the more foolish he looks. He had better develop a grasp of reality and leave before the world laughs him out of Iraq.
Frank Rich at the New York Times, in his column Someone Tell the President the War Is Over says:

What lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves . . . Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there . . .

And here's page one of the Washington Post:

The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say . . . Washington now does not expect to fully defeat the insurgency before departing, but instead to diminish it, officials and analysts said. There is also growing talk of turning over security responsibilities to the Iraqi forces even if they are not fully up to original U.S. expectations, in part because they have local legitimacy that U.S. troops often do not. "We've said we won't leave a day before it's necessary. But necessary is the key word -- necessary for them or for us? When we finally depart, it will probably be for us," a U.S. official said. Pressed by the cost of fighting an escalating insurgency, U.S. expectations for rebuilding Iraq -- and its $20 billion investment -- have fallen the farthest, current and former officials say.

And here's the result of it all -- the US president has shot himself in the foot in Iraq and so has squandered the capacity to play a leadership role in setting the world's military agenda.
Earlier this week, Bush told Israel television that he wouldn't rule out war with Iran. The reactions to Bush's comments found by Antiwar.com indicate that Bush made a fool of himself, in the world's opinion, by saying this and he is simply not being taken seriously as a military leader anymore. The BBC quotes Germany's Schroeder:

"Let's take the military option off the table. We have seen it doesn't work," Mr Schroeder told Social Democrats at the rally in Hanover, to rapturous applause from the crowd. Mr Schroeder said it remained important that Iran did not gain atomic weapons, and a strong negotiating position was important. "The Europeans and the Americans are united in this goal," he said. "Up to now we were also united in the way to pursue this." Mr Schroeder reiterates his views in an interview to be published Sunday in the German weekly Bild am Sonntag, labelling military action "extremely dangerous". "This is why I can with certainty exclude any participation by the German government under my direction," Mr Schroeder tells the paper.

And the Times has the British reaction:

The Foreign Office reacted swiftly. “Our position is clear and has been made very, very clear by the foreign secretary,” a spokesman said. “We do not think there are any circumstances where military action would be justified against Iran. It does not form part of British foreign policy.” So soon after the invasion of Iraq, which has led to so much political turmoil for Tony Blair’s administration, [British foreign secretary Jack Straw] is anxious not to be seen trying to talk up any future forays.