I know that some of the more ardent Shampoo Planet kids think that the
Network has rendered geography obselete but, well, they're just wrong. Look at a map. I've been looking at
maps for the last couple weeks and, for reasons that escape me, I didn't see it until this morning : Baghdad is,
for all intents and purposes, equidistance from the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and
the Persian Gulf. Actually, Mosul is closer to the center but both cities are on the Tigris and it's nothing that a
little urban sprawl couldn't fix. Meanwhile,
the only countries in that neighbourhood not already by necesitty, convinenience or, yes, conviction friends of America are
(drumroll) Syria and Iran. Do the math and, please, try to remember that people living in glass houses shouldn't throw
stones. The U.S. bank-rolled Iraq for 20 years and looked the other way, which is a polite way of saying they caved into
their agricultural lobbies and coughed up two billions dollars in credit to Saddam Hussein's government scarcely six months
after he'd gassed the Kurds. The question is not are the Europeans guilty of past sins (duh - the better question might be
have they finally learned something?) or whether they are looking out for their own interests (again, duh) but, perhaps, why now?