The War...

"What is your pension money doing right now?"

This is a very popular advertisement in all the Stockholm Subways right now.

Discussion of the war in Iraq is not quite as prominent here as it is in the US, but it receives at least one headline in the first two pages of the newspapers each day. Being an American here, I get a fair number of people asking about the war, Bush, and American intentions toward Iran. They are always very delicate in asking these questions, testing the waters to see how I will react if they try to talk about the topic. They want to ask "What the hell are you doing over there?" but do not want to start off the conversation in such a critical tone. People have what you might call 'an unspoken policy of appeasement' toward the US over here. If they refrain from angering the US with criticism, maybe--just maybe-- the US will cool off and the world can return to civility.
To state the general feeling here in a single phrase, people are afraid of what America might do.
--Not what the US might do to Sweden, but what it might do to other countries around the world. The US has become an unrestrained and unpredictable superpower that nobody can influence any longer, a bull going mad in a china shop.