Obama doesn’t care much about the traditional ties between US & UK
And Secretly Wishes the US didn’t have such Strong Ties with Israel
But for Better or for the Worst he is stuck with US traditional Allies
Quite frankly, I love having the British and Israelis as my Friends
Since they are NOT the ones who flew planes into us on 9/11
I Worked With the British, Israelis, And Arabs In The Military
I love having the British and Israelis as my war Comrades
I’m NOT Islamophobic, Just an Old fashioned US Realist
As well as an ancient albatross who is a Conservative
Waiting For The RETURN of MY Commander-in-Chief
To take me home to my permanent Home Address
Translated as “conversation” in Philippians 3:19
Greek meaning is “Permanent home Address”!
September 11, 2010
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Begin Two Excerpts from Middle East Online Article
Middle East Online
The End of an Affair
2010-09-10
By Jean-Claude-Sergeant
Begin Excerpt 1 from Article
Churchill initiated the Anglo-American affair, but now Obama doesn’t care much about the traditional ties between the United States and the United Kingdom, writes Jean-Claude Sergeant.
The term “special relationship” is usually attributed to Winston Churchill who used it in a speech in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946. (In the same speech he first referred to the “iron curtain” that would bisect Europe.) But others before had celebrated this bilateral relationship, strengthened in both world wars.
Arthur Balfour, then foreign secretary, declared in 1917: “We both spring from the same root … Are we not bound together forever?” Almost a century later, Tony Blair emphasized a different aspect, telling Britain’s ambassadors, gathered in London on 7 January 2003: “We are the ally of the US not because they are powerful, but because we share the same values.”
Begin Excerpt 2 from Article
How to exit Afghanistan
Today leaders on both sides of the Atlantic seem to be thinking more about the best way of exiting Afghanistan than about the illusory search for a military advantage. Obama already indicated late last year that the withdrawal of US troops could start by July 2011. This put Britain, which had been very careful not to fix a timetable, on the spot. The UK’s official line was to make its withdrawal subject to the capacity of the national Afghan forces to ensure the safety of the population. David Cameron, and Parliament, were still insisting on this on 21 June, after the death of the 300th British soldier was announced.
Commentators could not help comparing the balance sheet of the Iraq intervention, which cost 179 military lives, to the almost daily casualties in Afghanistan, in the name of a less and less credible objective. Cameron specified in a Sky News interview during the Toronto summit (before his meeting with Obama) that he was not obsessed by timetabling but hoped most of the British contingent would be back home by 2015 (before the next UK elections).
The new UK government, which is imposing a drastic austerity plan, is aware that public opinion will not accept a level of losses in Afghanistan proportionately higher than those of US forces. The British defense secretary Liam Fox was skeptical about the possibility of transforming Afghanistan into a democracy, an objective very different from that originally assigned to the military operation: drive the Taliban out of power and deprive al-Qaida of its Afghan sanctuaries. In an interview with The Times on 21 May 2010 Fox said: “We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country. We are there so the people of Britain and our global interests are not threatened.”
For the United States, the British government’s eurosceptic position — its most vocal supporters are William Hague in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Liam Fox at the MoD
— does not strengthen its status as favored ally.
According to Eric Edelman, formerly at the US Department of Defense, the disappearance of the generation that adhered to the concept of the special relationship defined by Churchill has led the new British elite to look more towards Europe. In defense and security matters, this vision seems over-optimistic.
The UK actively denounced the Brussels treaty (1948) that created the Western European Union; and the Cameron government envisages withdrawing the UK from the European defense Agency (EDA).
Michael Clarke, director of the strategic think tank, the Royal United Services Institute, suggests that the best way of advancing UK interests with US leaders, and especially
with Congress and US government agencies, is for British leaders to be viewed as catalysts for change in Europe, starting with defense and security issues.
The US president wants a Europe determined to take on resp
onsibility for these areas while remaining ready to respond to any call for solidarity that he might issue via NATO.
When Cameron declared in September 2006 that the relationship between a future Conservative government and its US ally would be “solid” without being “slavish,” he meant to mark a difference from the Blair-Bush relationship. Brown had insisted on distancing himself from the US leader, then failed to find a way of relating to Obama that went beyond diplomatic decorum.
Observers noted that Cameron did not go to Washington to get presidential backing before the May 2010 UK elections — as Blair had done before the 1997 elections. Perhaps Obama’s entourage still remembered the explicit Conservative support for the Republican candidate during the US presidential elections in 2008. That might also explain the tensions during the ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Obama called the oil slick caused by the explosion of the rig operated by BP (whose UK operations and assets exceed its US ones but not by much) “an ecological 9/11.” Under public pressure, he fiercely attacked BP and summoned its CEO Tony Hayward to appear before a House of Representatives committee. Obama and his aides systematically referred to BP as “British Petroleum,” a name that the company officially abandoned in 2000 in favor of “BP.” This insistence offended many people in Britain because it implied that the company’s Britishness was linked to the irresponsibility of the rig’s operators. There seemed to be an Anglophobic impulse that overlooked the fact that 40% of BP’s capital was held by US pension funds.
The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who was born in New York, told the BBC on 10 June that he was worried about anti-British rhetoric: “It starts to become a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the international airwaves.” Business and media were worrying about the collapse of BP’s share price, which lost half its value in 12 weeks, and the repercussions of this on British pension funds (which all have London Stock Exchange preference shares in their portfolios). A phone call between Obama and Cameron before the G20 summit could have thawed relations.
Other discrepancies on economic policy appeared during the Toronto summit. The United States w anted
an agreement that would limit the effects of
the austerity policies in Germany and the UK.
The new chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, had set out his emergency budget to the Commons on 22 June. For the United States, the priority was to safeguard the beginnings of an economic recovery a few months before the US mid-term elections. For the Europeans, especially
the British, the priority was to reduce budget deficits as well as national debts. Neither side budged. That did not stop Cameron, back in the Commons, from boasting about G20 support for his program to clean up public finances.
Such a program means a 20% reduction in m
inisterial budgets. The defense budget will probably be spared to some extent, but this amputation — and the renunciation of the principles of “liberal interventionism” dear to Blair — will influence how the United States evaluates its relationship with the UK.
As Douglas Hurd, foreign secretary under John Major, observes: “The survival and success of the partnership depends on
the usefulness of Britain to the United States as an efficient ally. We are sometimes deceived on this point by the courtesy of the Americans in their appearing to regard the Anglo-American partnership as crucial to the United States when in fact it is not.” — translated by Tom Genrich
Jean-Claude Sergeant is professor emeritus at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) University, Paris.
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