GERMAN AND FRENCH RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAR: Jeff Jarvis notes:

Below, I linked to an amazing story in Die Zeit quoting U.N. arms inspectors saying that German (and French, Russian, and Chinese) refusal to back military force in the U.N. defanged and doomed their effort and made war inevitable. Mind you, this comes from U.N. arms inspectors.

I wasn’t sure I had translated it correctly (if only I’d paid more attention in Frau T’s class!). So I went to my good blog friend Thomas Nephew, who translated the whole thing, and now it’s even clearer that this is an important piece of reporting — all the more amazing for coming from a German paper.

Read it, and then read this. As Jarvis notes:

History will judge every party in this war and whether they like it or not, Germany, France, Russia, and China are parties to this war.

It would not have harmed them to send a token gaggle of soldiers to the Mideast — just a few clerks without guns, even — to show united resolve to truly disarm Saddam. But by standing on some skewed sense of principle (Saddam over Bush, tyranny over democracy, Iraq over the U.S.), they made the disarmament they said they wanted impossible to reach, they made war inevitable.

Indeed, they did. And we should be sure they pay a price for that.