The Creaky Coalition

[Magical]

Britain says..."NEVER AGAIN"
More signs of "catastrophic success".


Newsweek - The War in Iraq

Nov. 1 issue - America's 138,000 troops in Iraq were asking for a little help from their British friends. Could an 850-strong armored battalion of Scotland's Black Watch Regiment please be redeployed from Basra, in southern Iraq, to the outskirts of Baghdad? The request seemed straightforward enough. Yet it triggered another political crisis for Prime Minister Tony Blair last week. As British commanders weighed the American request, London editors wrote scaremongering headlines about the Black Watch's walking into a "Triangle of Death." Blair's critics charged that acceding to the U.S. request would amount to an election-eve boost to Bush's presidential campaign. Is it not time "to say 'no' to the Americans?" one Labour Party M.P. demanded of Blair.

The prime minister didn't cave. But a new conventional wisdom is taking hold among Britain's military and foreign-policy elite: even if John Kerry defeats Bush, any British government will find it difficult, if not impossible, to muster popular support for a future American-led military intervention. A senior British diplomat put it bluntly to NEWSWEEK: "Never again."

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http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6315335/site/newsweek/