We have just seen a week of diplomatic chaos on Iraq, which was cynically initiated by France and Germany for their own domestic purposes and gullibly reported as meaningful by many American news outlets. Even now, this manufactured crisis is beginning to collapse of its own weight. In the case of Germany, it is noteworthy that Chancellor Gerhard Schroder made his extraordinary assertion that Germany would not even support a United Nations-backed war against Iraq during a political rally with his SPD party faithful in Lower Saxony. Desperately campaigning in his home state, he hoped to repeat his September election miracle...