Coalition of the Ever Less Willing

Lately the governments of a number of US vassals in Iraq - Poland, Italy, Japan, Ukraine, Bulgaria - tried to bridge the growing gap between public opinion and their obsequiousness with declarations on continued troop deployment that appear to promise a pullout.

But more important is something happening without much media attention. Do you remember the NATO promise of training Iraqi troops? That was the NATO decision even Germany hadn't vetoed, and tough it was derided at the time because most NATO members promised token units, still it represented real support and some countries' promises were of similar troop strength than in the previous phase of occupation.

For example, Hungary. Before parliament forced a pullout on the government, Hungary had 300 truck drivers in Iraq (who, giving the lie to the 'humanitarian' mission, dodged IEDs 95% of the time with military cargo). Our government sought to regain its (apart from red carpets rolled out at the White House, worthless) position in relation to Big Brother by promising 150 soldiers to guard the NATO training base in Baghdad.

Now it was leaked to Hungarian papers that there will be nothing of the sort. Allegedly, the new Iraqi puppet government doesn't want any foreign help in training, but at any rate, there won't be a deployment.

So the newest idea to savage our servitude at least in appearance is to offer the more than 70 stored T-72 tanks (yes, that means three-decades-old technology) to the puppet Iraqi army, if...

...if NATO pays the bill, that is.