Here's some more Manuel Castells.

2. Bush had three reasons to invade Iraq. The first was the application of the new doctrine of preventive action in order to neutralize states considered hostile and with the future capacity to develop arms of mass destruction before they can do so. The second, the control of the immense petroleum reserves of Iraq as an insurance policy against a possible crisis in Saudi Arabia. The third, a personal question of Bush's, to revenge the murder attempt on his father, as well as finishing the unfinished job of liquidating an old ally out of control, Saddam Hussein. To this were added the economic interests of the oil companies and others, like Dick Cheney's Halliburton company. Blair's motivations were also of a geopolitical order: to animate the danger of uncontrolled states and reaffirm the historic alliance with the US. Aznar's motivations are well-known: to place Spain, and himself in addition, in the world first division, as he assimilated Iraq, world terrorism, and ETA terrorism in order to recruit a powerful ally in his personal crusade. And the same for everybody else, from Berlusconi to the Eastern Europeans and even Japan, taking advantage of the opportunity to reinforce its ties with the US and moving away from their environments, looking for the protective umbrella of the superpower.

Mr. Castells, let me make something clear. Again, it's going to sound arrogant, and it probably is. Spain lives under the Anglo-American protective umbrella, and it's ridiculous to deny it. Spain would probably not be able to hold Ceuta and Melilla if not for American and NATO protection. To maintain its domestic independence within its claimed borders, which include those two Spanish cities on the African coast, Spain is dependent upon Great Britain and the United States, the enforcement arm of NATO, since Spain spends less money on defense than any other Western European country. Spain is effectively a US-UK protectorate, as it was during the entire Cold War. For reasons of national pride, Spain is often loath to admit this.

Other points: A) Note that in Mr. Castells's conspiracy mindset, every single country that participated in the Iraq invasion had an ulterior motive. Gee, Mr. Castells, you tell that to the Poles or the Ukranians, or to the Spanish soldiers who were and are still in Iraq. Or the Dominicans and Guatemalans. Or the Gurkhas. Or the rest of the Brits. Or the peshmerga. I don't want to be there when they give you your deserved thrashing. I have a tender stomach.

B) Isn't it just possible that Mr. Aznar believed that opposing dictatorships and terrorism was the morally correct, non-chickenshit thing to do?

C) Mr. Aznar demonstrated courage, something that Mr. Zapatero has yet to show any trace of.

D) Mr. Blair has demonstrated an unfailing ability to waffle and wobble and get himself into minor Mandelsonesque scrapes and try to please everybody on the small stuff, just like Bill Clinton. Unlike Mr. Clinton, Mr. Blair has always been dead straight right on the big stuff when it counted, as in Northern Ireland--it's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than it was--, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the War on Terrorism, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Tony Blair may be the most courageous politician alive. I agree with him so strongly on international issues that I forgive him all his other weaknesses and I trust his instincts, both political and ethical.

E) Mr. Castells has no concept of how the world economy works. Oil is 1% of international trade. The United States could be self-sufficient in energy for the foreseeable future, and I mean hundreds of years, if it were willing to pay the price it would cost--say $50 a barrel--to start major work on oil shale and higher tech to suck more out of the enormous oil, gas, and coalfields we've already found, not to mention all that's out there to find. The United States's GDP is NINE TRILLION DOLLARS. Energy is a tiny piece of that. (Weapons are even tinier: they're something like 0.06 percent of world trade.) And if we wanted to steal oil from the Gulf anyway, we'd just grab it from the UAE or Qatar or Bahrein or Kuwait, all of which would roll over and play dead for us if we kept their rulers in the luxurious appearance of power. No need to go to war. Besides, war is BAD for business. And Halliburton is making almost nothing, a few dozen million dollars, off its contracting in Iraq. Nothing at all on the global scale. There's simply no economic motivation there. The problem with oil is that countries who get their hands on it tend to become blinded by the easy money and go corrupt and dictatorial--see Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, Saudi, Libya, Nigeria, Indonesia, etc.--and become international dangers.

F) No United States President could get the necessary consent that Mr. Bush got from the Congress--we're still not sure whether John Kerry actually really meant to vote either for or against on this one, it depends on the day--merely in order to avenge an attack on his dad. That assassination attempt, for which Clinton shot a few missiles into Baghdad, counts as a casus belli, by the way. Just one more reason it's more than fair for the US to have overthrown Hussein.

G) "Preventive action" goes way back in history. It's nothing new. When we blockaded Cuba back in '62 that was preventive. We prevented the Russians from setting up intermediate-range missiles with which they could actually blow us up (now we know that Kennedy knew the Russians knew their other delivery mechanisms weren't worth a damn). The point of the Vietnam War was to prevent the Communists from taking over Indochina. The Israeli attack in the Six-Day War in 1967 was a preventive strike, as was the Israeli destruction of Iraq's French nuclear plant.

That's about all of Mr. Castells I can take for today. I swear this is the most ignorant person I have ever seen take himself so seriously.