Don't Wag Your Finger at Us, Mr Bush

There's a lot about President Bush's manner, breezing through Europe and telling us all to pull our socks up, that makes you want to wipe the smile off his face. 'Iraq ought to be on the minds of the German people,' he said to a TV station in Berlin, 'because the Iraq government is a dangerous government.' Well, yes, but how exactly has Saddam's stance changed since this time last year when America was enjoying the first month's of George Bush's carefree unilateralism and Iraq was some way down the agenda?

Not much, is the answer. Saddam has probably acquired a little more weaponry but essentially his regime is as barbarous to its own people and as menacing to the outside world as it was last year. 'This is a government that has gassed its own people,' Bush added, pressing home the point. Indeed, but that was back in August 1988 when estimates of between 50,000 and 180,000 were killed in the final solution of the Kurdish question. At the time it raised only modest interest in the US media.

The President's lecture tour of Europe and Russia reminds us how little experience he has of foreign affairs and how recent is his discovery of the history and complexities of issues which have been unquestionably better covered and probably better understood in Europe than in the US. As if to underline this point, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff have used the Commander-in-Chief's absence from Washington to reveal their deep concerns about any attack on Iraq.

Europe may have its faults, as Bush and Colin Powell reminded us last week, but whatever our weaknesses of coordination, resolution and principle, it still seems mightily rich of Bush to expect us to go along with a policy General Tommy Franks, head of US Central Command, said would require at least 200,000 US troops and result in large casualties.