Saw a very interesting editorial in the Daily Telegraph, which states that the New Republic and others have started to see the UK through the lens of its participation in Eurabia. The UK, with a large Muslim population, some of whom are apparently willing to commit acts of terrorism, and some of whom feel unaligned with the host country, and so in the eyes of the US at least, might be a source of terrorism.
Now, I don't agree with the point of view that all, or indeed almost any, Muslims are potential bomb-toting suicide terrorists, despite that fact that that's about the only depiction in the current media, but it does neatly illustrate the main point of the current "struggle".
Groups that are aligned along ethic and religious lines are not susceptible to classic warfare tactics, because they are often mixed in with another population of people who are not responsible for the problem. To take an example, given that a lot of IRA funding was from the sympathetic Irish Catholic populations in Boston and Chicago, would it have made sense, at least in this kind of thinking, for the UK to go and bomb North America. An instant of thought shows how ridiculous this would be.
If this is any indication of the sentiment in the broader US, then we are about to see an isolationism of the USA's main, and damn near only, ally in the war on terror, apart from Israel. That seems to me to be a very poor reward to Tony Blair for his insistence in staying the course. (Although there is a symmetrical example of this kind of tension, when in recent years the EU population named Israel as the greatest threat to world security in a public opinion poll, thereby putting a pretty final nail in the coffin of the idea of the EU as an honest broker in the region.)
So, as the real objectives of the war on terror, i.e. capturing the perpetrators of the original outrages, and preventing a re-occurrence, we are starting to see a lot of collateral damage on the foreign policy of different groups, and a tendency of the USA to either by intent or inaction to alienate itself further from its putative allies.
One thing is for sure, sending the UK population into the "dangerous and dodgy" queue at JFK and Orlando airports will not do much to support the notion of needful sacrifice of the UK troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. That would make the USA what the old British Empire people used to call some of the native allies: "jolly good enemy, jolly bad friend."
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