DF, I know (barely) enough French to follow the discussion, and agree with you entirely. While you may have been a little hard on vindavent, you were correct in pointing out that the US is at war. The British and most of the eastern EU understand that. The rest of Europe is still in the world of September 10.
There are widespread rumors here that the CIA director, George Tenet, resigned because there was enough intel to know that another attack will take place this summer, but he had not gotten enough to specify a target or prevent the attack. The embassy bombings in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole, and 9-11 all happened during his tenure, and the WMD intelligence came from his shop. This would be another screw-up costing American lives. We are not in a good mood.
Did you hear about the Pope lecturing Bush about the prison abuses in Iraq? In the same week, he bestowed a new position on Bernard Cardinal Law, the man who presided over the cover-up of far more hideous abuse of innocent children, not dead-end Baathists, over a perid of decades, not days. The UN, which is ignoring genocide in Sudan, is saying we should submit to an international court for war crimes. We also have had to endure lectures from the Germans on human rights, the French on imperialism, the Arabs on torture ... We'll have to let that slide for now, but we will revisit it later.
DF, if Europe gets the same kind of wake-up call that we did, it's going to get ugly (think Madrid times 15). If it does, you're welcome at my house. Just try to avoid late July, since that is when Boston is likely to be a terrorist target.