How's that for irony?
Posted on 07/14/2007 4:10:59 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
LONDON (Reuters) - New British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, seeking to squash speculation that London may distance itself from Washington over Iraq, has insisted the U.S. is still Britain's number one ally.
Since Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair as British prime minister last month, he has been at pains to stress there is no cooling off in Anglo-American relations -- but two of his ministers offered mixed signals.
Development Secretary Douglas Alexander said in a speech in Washington that while Britain stood beside the United States in fighting terrorism, isolationism did not work in an interdependent world.
Then Foreign Office Minister Mark Malloch Brown followed up in a weekend interview by saying that Britain had to nurture a wider range of allies and predicting London and Washington would no longer be "joined at the hip."
Blair's decision to back President George W. Bush and go to war in Iraq sent his popularity plummeting in Britain and contributed to his departure after a decade in power. He was lampooned as "Bush's poodle."
The change of premiership has prompted speculation that Britain might accelerate troop withdrawals from Iraq. Britain has been gradually reducing numbers in Iraq and now has about 5,500 troops in the south.
Miliband, writing in the News of the World tabloid, said there would be no change to the so-called "special relationship" between London and Washington.
"With a new Brown government, some people are looking for evidence that our alliance is breaking up. There isn't any and there won't be any," he wrote.
"Nothing has changed. Our strongest bilateral relationship is with the USA," he said.
Brown is flying to Berlin for talks on Monday and plans to visit Paris and Washington after that.
He has said he will continue to work closely with the U.S. administration.
"We'll not allow people to separate us from the United States of America in dealing with the common challenges we face around the world," he said, when asked to comment about minister Douglas Alexander's words.
Brown may have been forced to step in and seek to reassure Washington there is no major change in foreign policy -- but his popularity shows no signs of fading after he finally took over as prime minister after a decade in the wings.
An ICM survey in the Sunday Telegraph showed the Labour Party enjoyed its best poll position for almost two years -- 40 percent compared to 33 percent for the opposition Conservatives and 19 percent for the centrist Liberal Democrats.
In a News of the World poll, 53 percent felt Brown was best equipped to lead Britain compared to just 27 percent for David Cameron, the youthful Conservative leader who has rejuvenated his party after three electoral drubbings.
You speak for noone mate. Most Americans would laugh at your desperate anti British rhetoric.
You base your opinions...on a web chat? Absurd.
We have our morons, evidently you do to.
You’re not without extremists, anti americans, anti bush, anti iraq etc.
Our country has elected a parliament that supports the WOT and Iraq.
BOTH our leading parties do.
YOUR country threw out those that did in favour of a party that favours cut run and surrender.
We’re doing out part - instead of directing your anger at us - put your efforts into defeating the real enemy in your own home and return a republican president and a republican congress.
Gordon, you want to stay on our good side? Fire Mark Malloch Brown. Yesterday. Or better yet, make him ambassador here, where he’ll either learn manners or blow up spectacularly.
Genuinely sorry that you had to put with such crap.
The vast majority of British people are decent and fond of America,even those who may not honestly rate Bush. I do genuinely hope that you come back here again and meet more Britons and see that such ignorant ranting idiots are the minority.
All the best.
Genuinely sorry that you had read such crap.
The vast majority of British people are decent and fond of America,even those who may not honestly rate Bush. I do genuinely hope that you come here and meet more Britons and see that such ignorant ranting idiots are the minority.
I have spent the last year reading The Daily Telegraph, and I'm especially fond of the "Your View" section. It is enlightening to say the least. Is it possible for them to get through a week without having the usual anti-American red meat thrown to Telegraph readers? So don't be stupid and don't call me mate, we are not "mates."
You take care of your country we will take of ours. We can both do without one another, and in my opinion it is long over due. Hate and contempt is not exclusive property of the United Kingdom it can, and does go both ways.
Roots go deep. Principles embedded in such things as the Magna Carta and the Pilgrims were brought to us from the old country and found a good home here. Though the UK is more socialistic the US, and nowadays less Christian than it once was, yet, at bottom, I think we have the same roots.
I think one has to overlook the pettiness of some...on both sides.
Thank you, scotsman. Ignore the above rant it was not meant for you.
It is said over and over again that we arrived late, just in time to claim all if the glory. I have always wondered why when our “dear friends” were hanging on for dear life why did we wait? Now I realize that our fathers and grandfathers knew what they were doing. This anti-Americanism isn’t new. This has been going on a long, long time. We need to disengage ourselves from Europe, as our founding fathers warned over two hundred years ago. We must not make the same mistake a third time.
Well, having never actually been in the UK, I’ll have to take your word for it.
Apparently, it is the same sort of thing we experience with the Canadians. I don’t get it. America has always befriended our allies.
Re: your comment about the Brits attitude towards the Ruskies in WW2, I guess they would like us better if we were a totalitarian bully like the Soviets.
How's that for irony?
Of course we are. We owe them Big Time. Why would they cut us off before they get something in return later?
Creme, the British poster was an idiot,period.
And the ‘everyone ducked’ joke is an old,old one and just a silly one.Dont read too much into it.
Can I say one thing though?.
This is probably a reaction to AMERICAN attitudes to Britain in world war 2...
The British people frankly, Creme, are SICK FED UP of OUR contribution, our INCREDIBLE AND IMMENSE contribution in two world wars being ridiculed and marginalised more and more the further we recede from 1939-45...
Frankly, we have had now SIXTY YEARS of being told that America ‘bailed us out’, ‘saved our ass’, that ‘we would be speaking German if not for America’ etc etc.
It is in films...tv....print...the internet. The most successful recent Hollywood war film (Private Ryan) only mentions us in order to insult and distort our actions in Normandy...
On this site and on any, it seems that many Americans truly believe that they won two world wars singlehanded and that you bailed us out/saved us etc etc....I even increasingly read how you won the Falklands War for us...
So I am TRULY SORRY that you read ignorant comments from this side of the Atlantic about America in ww2.
BUT perhaps you may wish to reflect that there is just as much if not more arrogant,ignorant and frankly offensive rubbish talked about Britain and its role in the two world wars by far too many of your fellow countrymen and women...
This is a problem BOTH nations have.
Again, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
You’re the sort of person that reads a few remarks on a newspaper message board and makes some absurd capricious decision that it represents the whole of the UK.
Well that’s just insane.
As for going it alone - your politicians don’t agree with you and neither do the majority of your people.
Most British people love America, it’s culture and it’s history. Most are glad that historically we have stood sholder to sholder.
As for not liking the Bush administration - that doesn’t make them anti american and it in fact - it only really puts them in with the majority in your own country anyway, no matyter how much we may not like it.
CremeSaver, If you are upset now, I would suggest that you avoid the Telegraph "Your View," today. Maddening, yes. Insulting? absolutely. LOL!
Last week The Sun had a thread where Brown is removing Winston Churchill from history lessons? I wish there would have been more information on the story for as a poster asked, "How can you teach the history of the 20th century and not mention Winston Churchill is beyond me?" Me too. It seems to me that the British are in a very difficult situation. Their national pride won't allow them to be swallowed up by Europe, even though their government is pressing for it. On the other hand, they don't want to feel as if they are subordinates to the US either. From what I am reading they see their national identity eroding daily by the massive number of immigrants who don't want to be British (remind you of anyone?), and they have a government that doesn't listen to its citizens (again, sound familiar?). I see a people who are very angry, and at the same time a people who feel very impotent to solve their situation. I see a people whose smallest problem is whether or not to remain a close ally with US.
Whether we want to admit it or not, we are facing a very similar situation. I wish the British well, they have tough times ahead, and those times are nothing that anyone but themselves can cure. For us, we had better be paying close attention to our own backyard, there's a sinkhole back there, and it's growing daily.
P.S. I once suggested that we follow Winston Churchill's dream of an English speaking alliance between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and the US. I was told in no uncertain terms, leave out the US and it would be a good idea. Well, hell's bells it doesn't get more blunt than that, does it? These are the times we are living in. Every generation needs a villain. "Tag, we're it." Don't let it get you down Creme, there are people of good will everywhere, we have the scotsman and many more like him, concentrate on the good discard the rest.
Check my memory, but didn't he have an environmental or scientific portfolio recently, and hasn't he been involved in the row over "global warming" (TM)?
Sentiments not widely shared.....
Americans will not forget that, when all our "new best friends"(TM) were called away to their estancias on urgent business on 9/11, it was your PM, Tony Blair, who showed up sitting in the gallery of the House of Representatives during President Bush's address to the nation, the PM's pockets bulging with fine old Royal Navy brass knuckles.
When our "friends" ran, your people ran toward trouble, ready to catch a friend's back. That gets remembered for a long, long time.
And nobody over here thinks Tony Blair was President Bush's "poodle" ..... he was working very hard at selling us a proposition central to multilateralism, globalism, and the establishment of supranational entities like the International Court of Justice. We didn't bite, but it wasn't for any lack of trying on the part of Blair and his government. He wanted to be the middleman who delivered a new transatlantic relationship between the U.S. and the E.U., and he worked at that idea quite assiduously. The President, on the other hand, is constitutionally bound to keep us out of certain kinds of arrangments, just as PM's Major, Blair and Thatcher all avoided e.g. joining the euro group.
That's out of line. It's so off-base I don't know where to begin, but putting all that together based on a few cutesy-pie "man bites dog" posts in a popularizing British MSM blog is, to put it gently, like going over Niagara in a barrel just to prove something.
I appreciate that FRiend.
I completely realise it’s not a feeling widely shared.
“On this site and on any, it seems that many Americans truly believe that they won two world wars singlehanded and that you bailed us out/saved us etc etc.”
Hollywood’s main market is the US, hence the emphasis they put on America’s contribution to WW2. Most FReepers, however, know better, and have zero to very little confidence in anything Hollywood puts out.
We have history books over here, you know, I, for one, know the true story. The UK, under Churchill, are true heroes in the grand drama in Europe, WW2. They refused to cave in when their backs were against the wall, with the whole of Europe overrun by Hitler. For that, they have won my fullest respect. I view conservative Churchill, not liberal Roosevelt, as the greatest single figure of the 20th century. I think you would find most FReepers would agree.
We came in late, true, but I think we deserve at least a little credit for our contribution towards the defeat of Hitler.
But what about the Pacific? Who are the heroes who hung tough? True, Britain was heroic under Gen. Slim (one of the greatest generals of WW2, in my opinion) in Burma, but America, with Australia, played the major role in the final defeat of Japan.
I have yet to hear any American whine about Britain’s lesser contribution to the Pacific war. Yet, as indicated by your post, not so on your side of the Atlantic. Re: the late, and allegedly minimal, contribution by the US in the European war.
Remove Hollywood from the equation, and the little flap is solved.
“On this site and on any, it seems that many Americans truly believe that they won two world wars singlehanded and that you bailed us out/saved us etc etc.”
Hollywood’s main market is the US, hence the emphasis they put on America’s contribution to WW2. Most FReepers, however, know better, and have zero to very little confidence in anything Hollywood puts out.
We have history books over here, you know, I, for one, know the true story. The UK, under Churchill, are true heroes in the grand drama in Europe, WW2. They refused to cave in when their backs were against the wall, with the whole of Europe overrun by Hitler. For that, they have won my fullest respect. I view conservative Churchill, not liberal Roosevelt, as the greatest single figure of the 20th century. I think you would find most FReepers would agree.
We came in late, true, but I think we deserve at least a little credit for our contribution towards the defeat of Hitler.
But what about the Pacific? Who are the heroes who hung tough? True, Britain was heroic under Gen. Slim (one of the greatest generals of WW2, in my opinion) in Burma, but America, with Australia, played the major role in the final defeat of Japan.
I have yet to hear any American whine about Britain’s lesser contribution to the Pacific war. Yet, as indicated by your post, not so on your side of the Atlantic. Re: the late, and allegedly minimal, contribution by the US in the European war.
Remove Hollywood from the equation, and the little flap is solved.
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