Off the rails to make a killing By Mike Carlton March 15 2003 In 1914, for all the frantic diplomacy in the chanceries of Europe, the march to war became unstoppable when the German army mobilised by rail. It was impossible to turn back the Kaiser's troop trains. There is a similar, ominous inevitability about the coming war to remake Iraq in the image of Crawford, Texas. The United States has dispatched such colossal military force to the Middle East - with such deliberately noisy public spectacles as the detonation of the mother of all bombs the other day - that George Bush now has just two choices. He either pulls the trigger or he makes a humiliating backdown that would wreck his presidency. Guess which one he's gunna do. And John Howard will have us right in there with him. So war rushes in to fill the vacuum left by the catastrophic implosion of American diplomacy. This is a towering achievement for the Bush neo-conservatives who captured Washington, DC, with those few hanging chads in Florida. In the 18 months since September 11, their dazzling synthesis of arrogance and purblind stupidity has turned the civilised world's sympathy for America into fear of its power and distrust of its motives. Along the way, the Bush chickenhawks have managed to split Europe, to antagonise America's oldest ally, France, to wreck NATO, and to whip the British Labour Party into open revolt against the once-omnipotent Tony Blair. They are barely speaking to