Spain was a very reluctant ally, whose presence was necessary to give a slight cover of ‘international coalition’ credibility to a policy that was clearly US led, created and enacted by the US for the US.
It amazes me just how little credence some US posters give to ‘the rest of the world’.
Yes, the US has this overweening sense of self-righteousness, but somewhere, at some level of logical thought, someone in the US administration must surely wonder why so much of ‘the rest of the world’ had so mant doubts when they had access to pretty much the same intelligence as the US itself.
So now Spain has fallen out of love with a policy it had extreme reservations about, and no doubt Republicans in the US are wondering just how internationally threadbare their reactionary ideas are.
The US has been advised again and again that it was making one heck of a stretch to link AQ with Iraq, that the evidence was very fragile and unsupported by verifiable data, the US was advised by even the UK that it would be better to try go the UN route.
We in the UK still have huge doubts, very many of us think that the war in Iraq achieved the exact opposite of what the US said it would, despite unconvincing protestations by our own politicians.
It is not usually a good idea to run two wars at once, AQ should have been destroyed first before any moves on Iraq.
If a move on Iraq was so necessary whilst we were already engaged with AQ, it should have been due to an immediate and grave direct threat, and that should have been absolutely and unequivically and transparently provable.
It was not any of these things, and meanwhile US and Briitsh and UN personnel are being taken out one by one. This steady progression will have political consequencies, for as yet all we appear to have is a less safe world, a whole new radicalised population in Iraq plus ever more propaganda material for the recruiters of terrorists.
Aznar was exceedingly badly served by the US which pretty much set him up for a fall when the case for war evaporated, in a mountain of falsehoods and suppositions.
I imagine US citizens might fell let down by Spain, but in reality Spain has been let down by the US.
The US administration is full of pussies, they are pussies because they could not bring before themselves the courage to accept that they might actually have been wrong in their rubbish assessment of intelligence, for that would have meant admitting that the assessment of other agencies - especially foreign agencies - reflected reality better.
The US administration is full of pussies because they are too scared to admit that for all the talk, they were wrong on almost every assertion they made about Iraq, about the only assertion that the US administration made that was true then and is verifiably true now, is that Saddam Hussain is exceedingly unpleasant but then there was never any dispute about this.
The US administration is full of pussies because it had to act on US generated polices wether they were right wrong or just incompetant, they have to continue along the path they have chosen because to do otherwise would be to lose face, and the US administration is too weak in its moral self to be able to concede this.
The US administration is full of pussies because they dare not admit to themselves that others might actually have better ways of dealing with Iraq.
The US administration has not yet provided a convincing demonstration or discussion that would show the policies of other nations and organisations would not work, it has though provided a pretty convincing study of some of the risks of instant fix internationalism, quick military solutions without long term planned goals, and just making it all up as you go along.
The US administration is full of pussies because if it admits there were better ways of handling this situation, if it concedes that others were right, the US administration is fearful of the political consequencies in November.