Bush and Blair like to speak of how the "international community" is being challenged and how big their global coalition is. Haroon dissects the spin by examining the numbers:
If we take the European Union and the United States, we have a total population of about 750 million. If we add to that other countries concerned by Iran enough to want to censure, sanction or bomb it, well that's possibly Israel and Australia might come along for some good up and over fun, too, so let's add another 25 million, for a grand total of 775 million. Sounds like a lot. At first.
Outside of that, major countries of the world, such as China (1.3 billion), India (1.1 billion) and Russia (150 million) don't really feel Iran is a meaningful threat, and entire continents like Africa (795 million) just don't care enough to say anything. They have other, more pressing concerns, like Americans should have, if it wasn't for our rabble-rousing media. Of course, the typical neo-con will counter: "China and Russia aren't democracies." Well, India is a democracy, and the total number of Indians outnumbers all America and the EU. By a couple hundred million.So what international consensus are we talking about? What about Latin America, whose democracies also really don't care about what Iran does or doesn't do? Keep in mind that the population of Latin America is some 790 million, again outnumbering the US, EU and Israel; moreover, many Latin American countries are democracies, such as Brazil (185 million) and Argentina (about 40 million) and Mexico (roundabout 100 million); right there, we've got more voters than the United States.
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