AMERICA: Conor O'Clery's round-up of news from the US.
When German Chancellor Helmut Kohl came to Washington in 1994, President Bill Clinton took him for a slap-up meal in an Italian restaurant.
John Major then arrived in town and when he dined out, Clinton just dropped by for dessert. This sent a powerful signal of America's shifting concept of who was important among the European powers.
How things have changed. It is now loyal Tony Blair who is wooed by George Bush, and as the Special Relationship blossoms, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is not likely to get even the pudding treatment.
Bush "lost it" when he heard that German Justice Minister Herta Daubler-Gmelin had compared his electoral tactics to those of Hitler. But the Americans have been seething ever since Herr Schröder said he would not "click his heels" for President Bush over Iraq. They blame Schröder for creating the environment for Ms Daubler-Gmelin's comment.
The historical irony of dumping on a pacifist Germany seems to escape the administration. Bush complained about the German leader in a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who told him, according to Time magazine, that such foolishness would never happen in elections in his country.
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Harsh feelings for Germany are not new in America. The writer Kurt Vonnegut, in his autobiographical Palm Sunday, recalls that "anti-Germanism in this country during the first World War so shamed and dismayed my parents that they resolved to raise me without acquainting me with the language or the literature or the music or the oral family histories which my ancestors had loved."
Germans form the biggest ethnic group in the US, with an estimated 58 million people claiming German ancestry. Millions came to America in the mid-19th century for the same reason as the Irish, to escape a potato blight. But they arrived with different interests and expectations and assimilated quickly. They kept a very low profile during the two world wars.
Unlike Irish-Americans, they don't form a voting block to which a presidential candidate should pay attention. President Eisenhower was a German-American but no one ever thought of him as that.
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Ms Daubler-Gmelin isn't the only one to accuse the White House of playing politics with war. Al Gore charged Bush with using Iraq in campaigning for mid-term elections. In a speech in San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel on Monday, the former Vice-President also warned that a pre-emptive strike on Baghdad would distract the US from its war on terrorism.
San Francisco is Gore's heartland - he beat Bush by 1.3 million votes here - and the wildly partisan audience chanted "Re-elect Gore in 2004" and sang Hail to the Chief.
They were delighted to see Gore taking on Bush, in contrast to some Democrats in Congress, who have been caught up in the war fever. Gore accused the administration of a "do it alone, cowboy-type reaction to foreign affairs", and attacked the new Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strike, saying: "If other nations assert the same right, then the rule of law will quickly be replaced by the reign of fear."
Asked if he would run again against Bush, Gore said he would decide by December, based on "gut feeling". Many believe he is raring to go. But his speech makes him look as if he in reinventing himself, again. Six months ago he was for confronting Iraq, and he was one of the few Democrats to vote for the Gulf War in 1990.
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Democrats are indeed desperately worried that Iraq will divert the voters' attention from America's economic and corporate mess. This accounts for the impassioned outburst by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle on Wednesday, when he called on Bush to apologise for portraying Democrats as unpatriotic.
Bush had told Republicans in Trenton that the Democrat-controlled Senate "is more interested in special interests in Washington, and not interested in the security of the American people." (Perhaps he meant to say "than in the security of the American people", which is a bit less offensive.) Bush was referring to the Democrats' refusal to pass his version of a bill creating a homeland security department with 170,000 federal workers. Democrats say its provisions on hiring and firing undermine civil service bargaining rights and the White House accuses them of kowtowing to labour unions.
The Democrats are between a rock and a hard place, one observer said. If they cave in before the elections, they will anger union supporters. "If they fight on, they run the risk of getting destroyed at the polls." The average voter, he said, would not grasp the nuances of the Senate debate, and the advantage lies with the White House "bully pulpit".
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The much-vaunted homeland security bill may be dead until next year. The new Bush doctrine states that no foreign power will be allowed to catch up with the huge military lead of the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union. It actually had a strong lead long before that: in Moscow they used to joke about Brezhnev boasting that the US was heading for a precipice and that Russia would soon catch up and overtake it.
Ten years ago a prominent conservative ideologue wrote a similar policy document. It advocated a Pax Americana where the US kept other nations from rivalling its global power and acted independently when collective action was unavailable.
Its author was Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy US Defence Secretary. Bill Keller in the New York Times magazine revealed that Wolfowitz has been setting the agenda again, arguing obsessively for a move against Saddam Hussein since just after 9/11 when everyone else was focused on Afghanistan. Wolfowitz's favourite joke is about Saddam's barber, who, every time the Iraqi leader comes for a haircut, mentions the bloody fate of another dictator, Nicolae Ceaucescu, so that the hairs on the back of Saddam's neck will be easier to cut. Wolfowitz got the President's ear and by April Bush started talking about regime change. Now everyone is gearing up for war.
Terms such as "collateral damage" are often used to soften the harsh reality of war. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came up with a new one on Thursday when he said: "We fired some response options" - to describe the US bombing of Basra's civilian airfield terminal in southern Iraq.
I was in the very same building in September 1980 when an Iranian jet fired some "response options" nearby, and everyone dived under the table as the ceiling came down, including an Iraqi officer I was interviewing. A "response option", I can testify, makes a very loud bang and leaves people bleeding and dying.