As a Brit, I thought I ought to mention in passing that while providing fewer troops than us, your Australian allies have been at least as steadfast as us, and probably more so. I do find the sort of petty transatlantic bitching we’ve seen in this set of comments unutterably depressing, as generally speaking both American and British people, and American and British governments get on pretty well. What y’all are mostly ignoring is that you have had a Bush government since 2003, and we have had an Obama government. (Obama and Blair are pretty much indistinguishable – both all mouth and no trousers merchants. As the leader of a small power, Blair had no real option but to support Bush on the invasion. Obama in his position would have done the same thing. Incidentally I am not saying that a Bush government is necessarily a good thing in all areas, far from it – simply that on Iraq he has shown some genuine fortitude and moral character.) The British strategy in Basra has simply been a refusal to face reality – a preference for hope and fantasy over hard decisions and the risk of higher casualties. Together with a certain political naivete about equating the prospects of a negotiated accomodation with the IRA in the 1990s – essentially a defeated and exhausted band of a few hundred people – with the prospects of a negotiated accommodation with Iran and its proxies. That policy was entirely a political decision, nothing to do with the squaddies. The British Basra strategy was no different to the current Obama Iraq strategy – humiliating defeat and withdrawal is preferred to serious engagement. There are loads of Americans who approve of the Obama strategy – the fact that he’ll be a wimpy President doesn’t mean that all Americans are wimpy, or that America will forever have lost its honour, it just means that this time round America has elected a wimpy president. Surely y’all know that a government is not a reflection of the people, but merely an embarrassment to be put up with ? Don’t blame us all for our government – you can blame us a bit, because we’re a democracy. But not all of us voted for it, and we’ve thought better of it since. How would you like it if we kept on associating you guys with Jimmy Carter ?
