Amusing little piece, Noraid, btw, is the fundraising wing of the IRA in North America, solicits donations from idiot americans who think they're irish (much like me when i think i might get a free drink out of it... worth pointing out that 120m people worldwide claim irish ancestry although the population of ireland has never exceeded 8m). as liddle says, "There is terrorism directed against the US and terrorism directed elsewhere, you see. " or indeed commited by the US he might have added...

We're their allies - so why aren't they ours?
Rod Liddle
Wednesday February 12, 2003
The Guardian

What a divine pleasure it was to hear the Republican senator Pete King eviscerating the hapless French on our radios yesterday morning. It was a perfect way to begin the day: basking in the happiness of not being French, of not being, as Bart Simpson has it, a "cheese-eating surrender monkey".

The French are, according to Pete, an irrelevance - and useless, to boot. "They don't even have a working aircraft carrier," he kept repeating, between diatribes about France's heroic and longstanding commitment to the principle of capitulation. Garlic-swathed beignet-stuffed sexually dysfunctional trash-pop Petainist belching Gauloise-smoking hypocritical papist bastard haw-hee-haw Johnny bloody Halliday up-yours-Delors coward monkeys, the lot of them. From Biarritz to Lille. Via the town of Vichy. And apart from Emmanuelle Béart, of course.

For people like me, who enjoy a bit of spite and vituperation first thing, just to get the juices flowing, it was magnificent stuff. And there - curiously unspoken - in the background was the knowledge that Pete and other similarly enraged US politicians couldn't say the same thing about us, could they? We're right behind them, the Yanks, and this will ensure us a sliver of love from our transatlantic cousins, if only by the process of disassociation. And this matters, being loved by the US.

And then, rather disconcertingly, it suddenly occurred to me that this was the same Pete King who has spent the past 15 years similarly eviscerating the British, or the "Bruddush", for "centuries of oppression" inflicted upon the Irish people. Pete could always be relied upon to say a few words in support of Martin Galvin's evil Noraid organisation, or to wade into some delicate and confusing conundrum of Northern Ireland politics with his size 12 cowboy boots, ready to give succour to the IRA for the sake of securing a few more votes from his Irish and faux-Irish constituents. He always did so with a mixture of brio and crass ignorance. It is the same Pete King, isn't it?

Of course it is. And many of you may well agree with him about Northern Ireland. But my point is more straightforward. We should not delude ourselves that we get anything from standing four-square beside George W Bush, or any other American president, for that matter. They think we're an irrelevance too, and useless, and antiquated and decadent. And what's more, no matter how loyal we strive to be, they would not so much as bother to cross the road to piss on us were we suddenly to catch fire. This has been the signal lesson of the past 20 years of international politics.

Beginning, of course, with the Falklands "dispute". As the then defence secretary, John Nott, made clear in his strange autobiography, the Americans were a big problem. At least half of the US administration - a section led by the perfidious Jean Kirkpatrick - was vocally supportive of the Argentinian cause and attempted to thwart our attempts to regain the islands by force. Why? Because siding with us disturbed their various, disgusting, machinations in Latin America (please don't believe the US opposition was motivated by moral disgust at the prospect of bloodshed).

Incidentally, who were our real allies then, according to Nott? The cowardly French, who provided us, sotto voce, with invaluable intelligence on the Super Etendard fighter aircraft.

A year later the US invaded (ineptly, of course) the British sovereign territory of Grenada without so much as a by-your-leave or bud, do you mind if we sort this problem out? On this occasion, according to Denis Healey, what irked our prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, most "was not so much the overthrow of the (Grenadian) dictatorship ... as the fact that he (President Reagan) deliberately and successfully deceived her on his intentions, though he had often told her she was his personal friend and closest ally. Moreover, he did so as part of a conspiracy with certain commonwealth governments in the Caribbean, which also kept Mrs Thatcher in the dark." Plus ça change, huh.

More recently, within weeks of September 11 2001, the US failed, astonishingly, to outlaw Noraid, despite having proscribed and seized the assets of every other terrorist fundraising organisation in the known universe. There is terrorism directed against the US and terrorism directed elsewhere, you see.

And a little later, as Britain incurred a good deal of wrath for sticking its head above the parapet to support, unequivocally, financially and with our own servicemen, America's War Against Terror and immediate adventure in Afghanistan, the US whacked illegal tariffs on our steel exports, desperately injuring a beleaguered British industry.

Of course, the two issues are not remotely related, as US trade representatives, blank-faced and unrepentant, frequently pointed out. And it may well be that the US was "right" in all of the above little contretemps with Britain. But my point is more simple - and I suppose, fairly crass: that in every case where Britain may have expected, or even just desired, a degree of loyalty from our "closest allies", that loyalty has not been remotely forthcoming. It was last forthcoming, in fact, in about 1942.

None of this should deflect Tony Blair from supporting the US in a war against Iraq if he believes it is morally the right course of action and, further, that it is in our best interests. He may well think both of these things. But increasingly the debate is being seen as a question of where we stand; are we part of Europe or do we append our allegiance to the US? And, further, what do we gain as a result?

The French are perpetually accused of pursuing a selfish foreign policy and it is a charge which is hard to deny. But it is rather less selfish and small-minded than that pursued by the US, a country for which the concept "ally" works only, it would appear, in one direction.