We will lead...they will...follow?

Remember when Ari said that the world would line up behind us? I guess Ari lied...again.

Countries around the world voiced condemnation and regret on Thursday at the first U.S.-led strikes against Iraq. With the exception of Britain, America’s counterparts on the U.N. Security Council denounced the attack, and in Muslim nations protesters took to the streets to express solidarity with the Iraqi people.

RUSSIA AND CHINA criticized the U.S. strikes, while France and Germany lamented them and warned of the potential for catastrophe.

In some of the harshest words by a world leader so far, Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded a quick end to the attack, calling it a “big political mistake.”

“This military action is unjustified,” a grim Putin told Russia’s top ministers in the Kremlin, adding that it flouted world opinion and international law.

Putin’s comments were notable for their absence of diplomatic niceties toward President Bush, whom he has routinely described as a friend, or any words of sympathy for the Washington case against Iraq.

The Russian leader, desperately looking for a way to boost the sagging Russian economy, has been dragging his country into the arms of the West, and the United States in particular.

“Iraq has presented no danger, neither for neighboring countries nor for any region in the world,” Putin said, in a contradiction of Washington’s view.

So this is what it feels like to be an "outlaw nation". Funny. I thought it would have more of a 'bad boy' feel to it.

Meanwhile in the Middle East:

In Muslim nations, outrage brewed. In Pakistan, already brimming with anger against America, one religious-political coalition called the attack “barbaric,” and others demanded immediate intervention.

“It is open tyranny,” said Mohammed Asghar, his hand trembling with anger as he prepared tea in his ramshackle stall. “Every Pakistani Muslim should go to help the Iraqi people.”

Protesters in Egypt and Syria took to the streets Thursday to show their anger at the start of the war and demanded the expulsion of the U.S. ambassadors in both Arab countries.

Riot police used water cannons and batons to push back rock-throwing Egyptian protesters near the U.S. embassy in Cairo and in the city’s center, hundreds of people called for the expulsion of the U.S. ambassador.

“Empty Bush’s embassy, and throw out the ambassador,” they chanted. “Americans and Israelis are one enemy.”

In Damascus, protesters, waving Iraqi flags and pictures of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, called President Bush a “war criminal” and condemned Arab states allied with Washington as traitors and “slaves to America and its dollar.”

They demanded that Syria expel the U.S. ambassador and close down the mission, which had been temporarily shut to the public to “assess the security situation.”

The legislature in Jammu-Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state, adjourned Thursday in protest. “This is a war of self interest launched by the sole superpower,” said the state’s law and parliamentary affairs minister, Muzaffar Beig.

In Palestinian areas, a group of 700, mostly schoolchildren, waved Iraqi flags and posters of Saddam Hussein and burned American flags. Demonstrators in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun shouted: “We will sacrifice our soul and our blood for Saddam.”

Somewhere in a cave near Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden is laughing his ass off. He dared George Bush to put his tongue on the frozen post, and goaded on by Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rice, the clueless chucklehead did it.

Now we're all stuck.