Duck Season

For proof that some sensible Liberalness still exists in the pages of the liberal Guardian check out this column:

There is, I think, a widely shared fantasy which you might call the No-America Dream. In this happy place we have somehow done away with the economic and military superpower. We watch sophisticated French films or Ealing studio reruns, our thin citizens dine out on organic Brie, there is no Israel to over-excite the populations of the Middle East, and everyone signs up to stop climate change. If only the Yanks would go home. If only we could stop Bush.

The degree to which America is held uniquely responsible for the sins of the world is remarkable. To give but one example, writing in last week's New Statesman, a journalist called Neil Clark accuses America of being behind the Russian oligarchs who President Putin is so wisely (if unconstitutionally) cracking down on at the moment. 'In the oligarchs,' says Clark, 'Perle... saw a way in which the US and Israel could, by proxy, gain political and economic power in Russia...' The 'and Israel' should have warned the editor of the New Statesman what he was dealing with here. I suggest he visits David Irving's home page or the revisionist Zundelsite website very soon.

The double standards here are obvious but worth a reminder. During the week anti-Bush protesters will, we're told, be splashing red paint to symbolise the spilled blood of the people of Iraq. No such red paint was splashed around London after Halabja, after the 1991 Shia and Kurdish uprisings or during the Iran-Iraq war, almost as if that were not real Iraqi blood. Blood, after all, is only blood if Americans spill it.

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Where is the red paint to protest against the blasts at Najaf, of the UN in Baghdad, of the Red Cross, of the synagogues, of the Bali night-club, of the Arab-Jewish restaurant in Haifa? Where are the 'No Suicide Bombings' posters in the Muswell Hill windows? Or do you really believe we can save ourselves by constructing a huge wall around these islands, or around America, and painting it with smileys? That maybe then the ills of the world will leave us alone?

Nonsense. So, Mr Bush, not for yourself necessarily, but in your capacity as head of state of a liberal democracy, and as representative of a people that we admire, and whose help we have needed in the past and may need again, I say welcome.

(Link via The Corner.)