This just posted by Mr. Hitchens, and is well worth the time taken to read.
A most cogent portion states:
Personally, it fits very well with my
own experience of the true nature of the Anglo-American Unspecial
Relationship, which I have discussed here in the past, in the light of
Bill Clinton’s decision to back the provisional IRA against the British
government. Un unwise official from the West Wing told me, without
meaning to, that the White House regarded Britain as fundamentally no
different from Serbia.
This is why I shudder at US behaviour
in Syria. It is, once you have stripped away the rhetoric, interference
in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation. And if, one day, our
sovereign nation, Britain, asserted its independence, might we, too
find ourselves under attack first from international interventionist TV
stations telling lies about us, then from a rabble of ‘activists’ who
had mysteriously acquired arms and whose faults would be ignored or
overlooked, then from ‘NATO’ airpower and special forces, intervening to
‘protect’ these ‘activists’ from the ‘repression’ of our government,
which would be referred to by everyone as a ‘regime’? A ’No Fly Zone’
over East Anglia, to protect pro-EU ‘activists’ , anyone?
In a way it has already happened in
miniature in Northern Ireland. Most Americans (and many continental
Europeans) believed propaganda lies about what was happening there. The
USA gave its backing to the ‘activists’ of the IRA. And we surrendered
to pressure, stopped ‘killing our own people’ , as the British Army’s
actions against the IRA would no doubt nowadays be described. Then we
withdrew from the disputed territory (though most people haven’t yet
realised that this is what has happened). In a way we were lucky that
24-hour TV and liberal interventionism were in their infancy in the
1980s, or NATO might have bombed London in support of the IRA. We would
also never have been able to retake the Falklands.
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