I used to read and respect Hugo Young, a journalistic titan in Britain. He loathed Thatcher but gave her her due. But he has become in recent years a pathological Europhile, eager to merge Britain into a new European power to balance or rival the U.S. In that context, reading his latest work is saddening. Even from that distance, George W. Bush is driving him nuts. He’s headed for Krugman territory. Check out this column. There are the formulaic protests that he loves America, Americans, etc. And he’s a good liberal. But he says he “loathes” this war. Loathes? I certainly respect pragmatic liberals who opposed the war and still do. But even they – especially they – can also see the benefits of releasing a people from a terrible and grotesque police state and removing Saddam from power. To lose sight of these things is a sign of a warped and increasingly unbalanced perspective. He refers to the American government as “Bush’s gang” to which his country is in “abject thrall.” And then he comes up with this assessment of Tony Blair’s foreign policy:
For Blair, in his Bush-Iraq mode, [foreign policy] has been a lot more theoretical: the theory of pre-emptive intervention in a third country’s affairs, for moral purposes, at the instigation of the power whose hyperdom he cannot resist. What does this mean? That we have ceased to be a sovereign nation. … What it means to be an independent nation is a question that touches the wellsprings of a people’s being. Yet it is one that our leader, as regards this war, has simply disguised from his people, egged on by sufficient numbers of North American papers and journalists who seem to be wholly delighted at the prospect of surrendering it. I do not believe this obtuseness can last for ever. If there is one virtue in the unfinished history of the Iraq war, it is that the British may finally wake up to what the special relationship is doing to their existence.
Their existence? Suddenly this left-liberal sounds like the most fanatical of Tory Europhobes. And yet not an iota of sovereignty has been lost to the United States in this conflict – certainly not a smidgen of the degree to which British sovereignty has been surrenderd to Brussels. Young also seems to believe that tackling the new nexus of terrorism and WMDs has nothing to do with British interests. How? Does he think Britain is somehow immune from the threat? Does he remember how many British citizens were murdered on September 11? There is, it seems to me, a poison out there, infecting minds that were once clear, blurring argument into a welter of hatred for the United States. And it’s not just in Britain.
The Dish 