Louis Michel went too far

A senior Belgian official told me last week that Mr. Michel "now realizes he's gone too far, that he's made comments he ought not to have made, and is trying to calm things down." Too late. His government situated itself against the war and the U.S. out of a long tradition of subservience to the French and out of fear that otherwise its large Muslim population would riot. "The people then may react by voting for the far right," a Belgian official told me.

Michael Gonzalez in The Wall Street Journal van 10 april 2003