European Document/The Gulf Across the Atlantic
Reid, Stuart
EUROPEAN DOCUMENT THE GULF ACROSS THE ATLANTIC London One does not like to intrude on pri- kj vate joy, but it has to be said that, the Gulf alliance and Sir Stormin' Norman notwithstanding,...
...Harold Pinter, in the Observer, wrote: "What the U.S...
...The Americans are very good at throwing heavy, explosive objects over long distances...
...You'll never lose an idea again...
...With the race relations industry growing in strength every day, anti-Americanism is one of the fewindulgences open to free-born Englishmen...
...Writing in the London Spectator two days before the start of Operation Desert Storm, he laid three-to-one against a war in the next ten days...
...Army could not hack it now expressed satisfaction that the Americans were at last reverting to stereotype by leaving a job half done...
...It's for writers and researchers, not computer experts...
...In fact, the Gulf War, far from improving Anglo-American relations, may actually have worsened them...
...Try it...
...Thatcher's vision—closer ties to the North American barbarians...
...Ex-army types shook their heads over the Scotch and sodas shaking in their hands and noted, with satisfaction, that the U.S...
...On the right it was represented by Enoch Powell, the one-time Conservative party minister who had his fifteen minutes of fame in 1968 when he predicted that black immigration would result in civil war (the "Rivers of Blood" speech...
...What was wrong with them...
...Worst of all, you lose some of your best ideas, just when they would do the most good for your career...
...What Squarenote does for you is to collect all your information into one accessible, printable, sortable index card file...
...Once the January 15 deadline had run out, he said, George Bush would very likely name another deadline, then another, but in such terms as would make it plain that the United States was relying on a policy of blockade...
...Up to its ankles in treacle...
...Neither batted an eyelid when, in mentioning the 1-racky capability of dealing with Paytriot missels, the expert ruled out the possibility of any 1-racky an-tie an-tie missel missel missels...
...Does it matter that a fellow of All Souls believes that divorce, abortion, homosexuality, and consumerism are the values that count in America, or that one or two high-minded journalists don't like the way Americans talk...
...Thatcher is possibly the last...
...Some even spoke of President Bush in reverential tones...
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...In the Sunday 7elegraph last year, Clark made, or seemed to make, the recondite argument that the United States was as much our ancient enemy as it was our natural ally, no matter what the champions of the special relationship might say...
...Saddam's canny promise of the Mother of Battles made a deep impression...
...Prime Minister John Major is not anti-American, but neither is he, in the Thatcherite sense, an Atlanticist, a breed of which Mrs...
...Clark has a real problem with the United States...
...At a smart London gathering, a distinguished High lbry academic sipped champagne and said: "Of course the Americans will run...
...Now that the Cold War is "over," American protection is no longer deemed necessary, and there is therefore no reason for conservatives to go on ingratiating themselves with the United States...
...The ex-army types who had consoled themselves with the thought that the U.S...
...Major is a Europeanist and he looks to Brussels (or Bonn) rather than to Washington for reassurance...
...they always do...
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...by Stuart Reid Far from it...
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...But since "our" boys were involved, most anti-American conservatives were prudent enough not to go public with their thoughts...
...ECS, Dion, NY...
...You'll actually see the tops of your filing cabinets and desks, slim down your briefcase, and clean out your pockets...
...Happy days are here again...
...Elsewhere, though, the left's opposition to the war was based partly on traditional pacifist sentiments and partly on the belief that the West should not embroil itself in an Arab quarrel...
...PC Ma&rzine's Editor's Choice Award UnionSquareware 27 St...
...For most of the American young, there is only one basic problem: the simple matter of achieving satisfaction and avoiding frustration...
...One Thatcher admirer who may fmd himself in precisely this tricky position is Jonathan Clark, revisionist historian and fellow of All Souls, Oxford...
...It runs on any PC...
...Powell is not that sort of person...
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...Now that the KGB has nuclear artillery pieces, and Moscow is transferring its tanks to the navy, that is a skill that may come in handy...
...The postwar "universalist theory," he wrote, reflected the "aspiration of the United States to project its new-found power in the defence of something called 'the world' against a moral antibody known as 'communism.' " It is a measure of Powell's knee-jerk anti-Americanism that he implicitly mocks the idea that Communism is morally repugnant...
...All because of paper clutter...
...Besides, the right is not entirely wrong in its misgivings about the United States...
...You'll have no trouble identifying us: we're the ones who don't talk funny...
...In some British eyes the Germans may be pusillanimous, the French devious, the Spanish and the Italians frankly unreliable—but aren't the Americans, with their death-disguising rhetoric and apparent disregard for Iraqi civilian casualties, simply awful...
...Even Kenneth Minogue, professor of political science at the London School of Economics and a good friend of America, was moved to mockery...
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...At the height of Desert Storm, a leading article in the center-right Independent on Sunday put it this way: As the war advances . . . a powerful idea rises...
...America is no doubt big enough to look after herself...
...ertainly that was the beef of Simon Heffer, writing in the Daily Telegraph...
...But so what...
...Hitler and Stalin gave them pause...
...For his outburst, he was sacked from the shadow cabinet by Prime Minister Edward Heath, and has been playing the injured innocent ever since...
...In April, the francophile Conservative MP Julian Amery attacked the "craven" Bush and drew a conclusion that should comfort American isolationists: "The subservience of American leaders to their domestic opinion sets narrow limits to what they can achieve...
...During the Cold War, American protection was thought to be necessary against an expansionist Soviet Union, and the right therefore cozied up to America (while the left, hitherto friendly towards America—at least to the America of Tom Paine—reacted against the anti-Communism of the late 1940s and early 1950s...
...Political discussion at every level was dominated by the possibility that some soldiers might actually get killed...
...Then his knee began to tremble: "In cultural terms Western Europe was swamped by the teal American values (divorce, abortion, homosexuality, consumerism) as the American colonies had been by the British culture in the 18th century...
...His is an austere view, intellectual rather than knee-jerk (though, as we shall see, he sometimes loses control of his knees...
...When President Bush dropped the white man's burden on the road to Basra, themedia resounded with scorn...
...We [the French and the British] must develop more muscle if we are to exercise more influence in defense of our interests next time they are threatened...
...indeed, on occasion it is anti-Semitism...
...Well, the special relationship may have been useful for the powerelites of the two countries, but by the time it had come to an end (in his view, the Suez crisis of 1956 finished it off) England had paid a terrible price for its dalliance: it had lost its empire, and lost its identity...
...Army would not be able to handle a Somme...
...Writers, Researchers...
...Not since Marlborough created, and held together, his great and victorious coalition has there been so successful an act of international statesmanship," wrote the celebrated Conservative commentator (and Atlanticist), Sir Peregrine Worsthorne...
...All this places Thatcherite anti-Americans in a tricky position: on the one hand they despise Major's Europeanism...
...In some quarters last August there was a feeling, amounting at times to a happy conviction, that the Americans would not fight...
...Vidal reminds us that, like McDonald's and Levi's, anti-Americanism is a strong American export...
...But are we...
...Once the shooting started, hardline conservatives went for deep cover...
...Since no one can seriously expect military leaders not to try to disguise or sanitize the terrors of war—they have been doing that since the invention of the spear—the real objection here was that the Americans talk funny...
...E ven so, it seems to some of us a pity that an alliance that has served both countries well should be in danger because of a fanciful belief, as widely held in the United States as in England, that the Soviet Union is no longer a threat...
...on the other, they are unable to embrace the alternative to a federal Europe implicit in Mrs...
...The fact is, though, that in England anti-Americanism has much in common with anti-Semitism...
...Before World War II, some English conservatives were as openly anti-Semitic as they were anti-American...
...His case against the war was telling (as was Pat Buchanan's), but it was informed as much by contempt for collectivist (i.e., U.S./U.N.-dominated) security arrangements as by his perception of the United Kingdom's national interests...
...Bliss is it in this dawn to be alive...
...Paper clutter makes you inefficient, frustrated, and can really hurt your career...
...But to the fastidious Englishman it was not just that the Americans were lacking in vision and moral fiber...
...Clean up your desk and briefcase...
...They were bloody in other ways...
...Like other anti-Americans, Powell has a taste for conspiracy theories...
...Views equally contemptuous of the United States were held by at least one member of the government...
...Call now...
...Having spent the war at Bowling Green, Ohio, he wrote on his return: "You might expect [America] to take a distant war against a minor power in its stride...
...it couldn't even handle a peasant army in the 1960s...
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...Geopoliticians in Clubland concluded that Iraq would have to commit further aggression before the United States did more than go in for a few sanctions...
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...He warmed to his theme: America is a rationalist civilisation in which everything is a technical problem, and a book will tell you how to solve it...
...There was talk of another Somme...
...John Pilger, in the New Statesman, went through the routine condemnations of American neocolonialist barbarism...
...If there was a war, the Yanks would probably buckle under the strain: Stuart Reid is assistant features editor of the London Sunday 'Iblegraph...
...It is to Clark that we must turn to place conservative suspicion of the United States in its wider historical context...
...We may need to call on you again...
...In the same Observer feature (which carried the strapline THE GULF WAR—THE INTELLECTUAL VIEW) Gore Vidal opined: The American empire will expire in a long desert war where no American national interest is involved other than that of Holy Zion, as the Good Book says, and what is left of the United States will then depart to take up its rightful place somewhere between our fellow hemispheric losers, Brazil and Argentina...
...Not so, however, the anarcho-conservative columnist Auberon Waugh...
...No one can look at the PC terror, for example, or at the conformity of the American press, without experiencing dreads and doubts...
...He did not, however, go as far as some conservatives (and others) last August and suggest that the Gulf conflict was a Jewish-American plot...
...It's asserting what it conceives to be its spiritual destiny: 'I'm God: get out of my f---ing way.' The stench is with us forever...
...Mainstream conservatives did what mainstream conservatives always do in time of war: they cheered...
...Of course, the left, too, brought its guns to bear on the Americans...
...but to be an old reactionary is very heaven...
...Heapparently believes, for example, that the CIA murdered Lord Mountbatten...
...She adores America, and is in turn adored by Americans, who now form her natural constituency...
...Preserve those precious ideas...
...As it moves to the center—that is, towards Europe—the party necessarily moves away from the United States...
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...How could he have known that a friendly reference to "grinning piccaninnies" would have caused such offense...
...Mercifully, the infantry will not be required to move until the way has been cleared, so we may be spared the sight of American troops refusing to move, shooting their officers and burying themselves in the sand...
...You might well think this is true of the whole human race...
...Part of the answer, according to the Independent on Sunday, was that they used "a debased form of English whose purpose seemed to be to disguise or sanitise the terrors of war...
...The right, therefore, at least part of it, is not discovering anti-Americanism but reverting to it...
...The Yanks may chew gum, debase the language, and shoot their officers, but as Auberon Waugh observed, they are very good at throwing heavy, explosive objects over long distances...
...EUROPEAN DOCUMENT THE GULF ACROSS THE ATLANTIC London One does not like to intrude on pri- kj vate joy, but it has to be said that, the Gulf alliance and Sir Stormin' Norman notwithstanding, anti-American-ism is once again in fashion here, not least on the right...
...In a piece that was almost comic in its erudition ("The past participle gotten is historically proper grammar and the pronunciation skedule is etymologically legitimate"), he complained that the Americans had American accents, and used American jargon on television: 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 Perhaps the most boggling usage encountered so far was uttered by an American military expert who, when the missile attacks began on TC1 Aviv and Riyadh, was discussing an-tie missel missels with an American interviewer...
...The infatuation did not last...
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...At the point of the bayonet," Clark declared, "the constitutions of Germany, Italy and Japan were reconstructed on American lines, and the United States made it impossible for Britain not to equip its Third World colonies with similarly inappropriate constitutional ideas...
...You can't find things when you need them...
...W here does that leave the Tory party itself...
...MA 02146 Telephone 617-277-9222 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 23...
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Vol. 24 • August 1991 • No. 8
