This is the B52 culture, folks

I could, if I wish, describe President George Bush as the most bland, colourless US President I have ever known.

The fact that Tony Blair is trotting around Bush does not help to improve his image.

But worse still is GB’s decision to oblige world states to decide whether they are with the US or against.

"Not to be with us is against us." These were Bush’s words.

So are we supposed to sever our ties with all the nations that are black-listed by the US?

This sort of talk takes us back to the bad old days, and the only reason that the EU leaders are singing to GB’s tune is that they have not quite gauged public opinion. When they do, they will retreat - just wait and see.

Across Europe, the media and the public are shocked at the events in the US, but they share one common feeling: that this has been coming for a very long time.

The US has never quite experienced falling bombs, as in Dresden, St Nazaire, Rotterdam or Valletta for that matter. With all their star war programmes, subterfuge, technology, military might, Allah made it to them before the nukes and humiliated them.

As in all episodes in history, everyday working people died and families suffered. But to the US, the primary concern is their dent to their national pride.

The US is a unique story, it is a ‘minestra’ of people who revel in an inflated national pride, that they call patriotism and Europeans choose to label as dangerous nationalism.

To sustain this, they hope to retaliate by using the most inaccurate bombers; the clumsy B52 and other military playthings on a country that is already condemned to stone age – thanks to the former Soviet Union and the infighting between rival Moslem groups.

One group, by the way, is still subsidised by the US and the other by Moslem states.

The US hopes, of course, to napalm Bin Laden out of his den, believing that once he is incinerated to another planet, they would have solved the problem of terrorism.

This is the typical American way of doing things.

US policies have been a case study for bizarre and banal diplomacy.

They armed Saddam Hussein to hit out at Iran and then discovered that he was a tyrant. They did the same to rogue states in Central America, Central Africa and the Mediterranean. They armed militaristic, despotic Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia.

They intervened in Somalia and were forced to leave after finding a children’s army waiting for them. They moved into Beirut and were greeted by suicide bombs, they attempted to save their imprisoned Tehran embassy staff and crashed in a desert. They mistook a passenger liner for a jet and shot it down in the Arabian seas. They fired million dollar missiles at the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, because they had old maps.

They launched two military campaigns without managing to arrest or kill Saddam or Milosevic.

Their military calendar is dotted with examples of incompetence, disorganised planning and poor military insight.

If the US goes on a bombing spree around the world it will achieve nothing, other than adding more tension, economic strife and world crisis. If, on the other hand, it shifts its dollar bills to sponsor and broker peace in the Middle East and uplift the poor peoples of the world by injecting new initiatives, then it would have gained much.

The Europeans know this.

In Malta we will probably rub our hands and glee if the US bomb the Afghans.

But then we have always loved the US and disliked those that have for decades suffered the politics of British, Italian and French imperial power and of late, US affairs.