WORLD VIEW/Paul Gillespie: EU ministers at their meeting last weekend in Elsinore were not inclined to do any such thing, but to press the US to consult allies and seek UN approval.
"Do you want to run the world of the 21st century or do you want to lead the world?" So asks former President Bill Clinton in a pointed speech this week on US policy towards Iraq.
As he put it, "there's a big difference".
He says Osama bin Laden, not Iraq, killed 3,100 people on September 11th and is still at large.
His Democratic predecessor in that office, Jimmy Carter, writing in the Washington Post, argues:
"Fundamental changes are taking place in the historical policies of the United States with regard to human rights, our role in the community of nations and the Middle East peace process - largely without definitive debates, except at times within the administration."
Mr Carter says some of these changes flow from President Bush's quick and well-advised responses to the September 11th atrocities, but that "others seem to be developing from a core group of conservatives trying to realise long-pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism."
They certainly seem to want the US to run the world and believe it has the military capacity to do so.
In the current issue of Prospect magazine Anatol Lieven quotes the unguarded words of one White House official, that what they have done is "take 9/11 and load our whole agenda on to it".
A book published by a number of them in 2000 was bitterly critical of the Clinton administration and advocated maximum toughness against threats to the US from supposedly powerful rival states.
This is uncannily echoed in the state of play one year on from September 11th.
It finds the US still directly involved in Afghanistan, actively planning a war on Iraq, classifying North Korea and Iran as parts of the axis of evil and with the core group of conservatives now hinting strongly that Saudi Arabia should be so classified as well.
Lieven adds that their unthinkingly uncritical attitude to Israel means the US-Israel alliance is "taking on some of the same mutually calamitous aspects as Russia's commitment to Serbia in 1914".
Their other main focus has been on how such a superpower should relate to its European allies.
One of their number, Robert Kagan, asks: "Can the US handle the rest of the world without much help from Europe? The answer is that it already does.
"The US has maintained strategic stability in Asia with no help from Europe.
"In the Gulf War, European help was token; so it has been in Afghanistan; and so it would be in an invasion of Iraq. Europe has little to offer the US in strategic military terms since the end of the Cold War."
Many of this group are inclined to conclude that the US relationship with Europe has thereby shifted unalterably and can now be effectively disregarded.
They would appear to have been over-ruled by those within the administration who still believe multilateral methods are required to secure broad legitimacy for an attack on Iraq and who understand this will need another United Nations Security Council resolution.
But can it be so phrased as to leave the US leeway to attack if strict terms are not adhered to?
The Blair-Bush summit this weekend will help to clarify this, as will President Bush's other consultations with Security Council members.
The big question here is whether the consultations with Congress, allies and the UN represent a tactical shift within a unified administration or the difference Clinton referred to between leading and running the world in the 21st century.
Did September 11th represent a major break in the world strategic environment and reveal deep historical and cultural differences between Europe and the United States that were disguised through most of the last century?
Some of these differences were revealed at the Johannesburg summit on sustainable development this week, where the US Secretary of State was heckled and booed after the US delegation blocked progress on several major points of the agenda.
But some of the hecklers were Americans, echoing their own debates about whether they should lead or run the world.
That the intra-American debate is reflected in the US-European one is further illustrated by William Pfaff, the veteran Los Angeles Times/International Herald Tribune columnist, this week.
He points out that following September 11th there was a spontaneous identification with its victims by its European allies, coupled with an unprecedented invocation of the Article 5 military solidarity clause in the NATO Charter.
Paul Wolfowitz, one of the principal hard-core conservatives, politely thanked NATO ministers for the gesture but said the US would proceed without it on an ad-hoc basis in its campaign against al-Qaeda.
This it proceeded to do in Afghanistan, mindful of the cumbersome consensus procedures required by the 1999 NATO operation in Kosovo and much more aware now of the growing mismatch between US and European military technology.
Pfaff reminds us of the growing gulf that has opened up between US and European attitudes over the last year, saying it is not surprising and was bound to happen at some stage after the end of the Cold War.
It would be open to European states to refuse the US assets for an attack on Iraq.
That would not necessarily put an end to NATO, since the US needs the alliance more than the Europeans as "an indispensable infrastructure for US military deployments throughout Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East and Africa".
They have been gratified by President Bush's apparent commitment to do that this week and await convincing evidence that Iraq is indeed in possession of and willing to use or distribute weapons of mass destruction.
Whatever happens, Europeans are closer to the Middle East, more aware of the consequences of regional stability there and more likely to have to bear its human and financial costs.
Pfaff also points out that this developing crisis reinforces and complicates the task facing the EU as it debates its future political, foreign policy and military/security structures.
In order to project its soft power effectively it needs to develop a greater military capability independent of the US.
That includes spending more on it. It seems that the Iraq crisis will frame that debate, just as it is increasingly likely to frame the debate in Ireland about where this State's optimal interests and values lie, in the second Nice referendum.