Even with a UN mandate, the decision to send soldiers to Iraq would require considerable political soul-searching for many countries because of widespread opposition to the war.
The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has reinforced the feeling in Europe and elsewhere that the war should have never been fought. Recent doubts about claims that Iraq had tried to import uranium from Africa, as U.S. President George W. Bush maintained in his State of the Union address in January, have revived debate in Europe over the basis for the war.
That in turn would make it hard for governments to convince their publics of the need to risk the lives of their own soldiers to help America out of a problem of its own making.
"Whatever they may have achieved with their bombs and missiles in Iraq ... is overshadowed by the suspicion, which is being confirmed ever more, that for the sake of the war they grotesquely exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein," Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung said today.
Germany's Berliner Zeitung newspaper said that the governments in Washington and London "rather than those in Berlin and Paris are today finding it most difficult to justify their actions" in Iraq.
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