[Clive]
Here’s a question for Alex and Danny. Anti-Americanism is at a painfully high level in Britain. How much will it decline once George W. Bush leaves office? Obviously, there’ll be some sort of falling-off (touch wood). But has permanent damage been done to the transatlantic friendship? My sense is that Washington has been so ham-fisted in its treatment of Downing Street that we’ve reached a genuine watershed. (For heavens sake, even sending us a new ambassador appeared to be too much of an effort for a while.)
I don’t expect much from the Democrats either. Am I being overly gloomy? There’s the alternative view – conveyed in that Art Buchwald anecdote – that America inevitably suffers the consequences of being top dog, and can’t do much about it. I definitely wouldn’t want to minimize the amount of hostility simmering away in Britain before Iraq and Afghanistan. In the days immediately after the Twin Towers fell I lost count of the number of people I met who shrugged their shoulders and said something along the lines of "Of course it was terrible what happened, but what about Palestine, Kyoto, etc, etc?" That’s why I became such a keen reader of blogs like this one. It was one of the few places there seemed to be any sane conversation.
The Dish 