Remember when the right wing was constantly accusing the Obama Administration of “throwing our allies under the bus”? Well, now it seems our allies are doing that to us! Anne Applebaum is distressed to notice that the British aren’t all that interested in saving the world these days. Apparently, “The Iraq war turned many in Britain off the idea of ever cooperating with Americans.” Imagine that! It’s almost as if the staggering record of incompetence and deceit forged by the Bush administration and the Blair government has given wanton interventionism a bad name!
Anne doesn’t bother to consider why “many in Britain” found Iraqi War II to be such a turn-off1, but she is sure that if the U.S. had intervened in Syria that would have, somehow, prevented the emergence of ISIS in Iraq, because intervention always works. Even now, she moans, the Brits are only coughing up eight planes to combat the menace of ISIS, “hardly an overwhelming commitment.” As for Ukraine, well, they hardly seem to know where it is. In short, groans Anne, “In a country where the political class is consumed by an argument over the constitutional status of Scotland, events in the Middle East or Ukraine do seem far away.”
I’m sorry, Anne, but “an argument over the constitutional status of Scotland” is hardly le mot juste. The Scotties are ready to pack their bags and go, ending a 300-year union with England, reducing the size of the United Kingdom by almost a third and the population by about 9 percent. And it’s not just the “political class” in the UK who are talking about it. In Scotland, it’s just about everyone.
Afterwords
The story behind the story for all this is that Anne is married to a prominent Polish politician, Radosław Sikorski, until recently minister for foreign affairs for that country. As I’ve written before, Anne’s constant goal is to argue for interventionism as a way of life.
- Well, really, who knew? Iraqi War I had been so much fun! ↩︎
