Department of huh?

Cohen’s an ass who knows nothing about America. Of course his test of “anti-American” is going to be idiotic.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t support Obama. A friend of mine who migrated from East London to the sticks in Ohio convinced all his new rural friends to register as Democrats and vote for Obama too.

I agree with the previous commenter. Cohen is an ass.
Are you setting up dsquared for something?

Well, wouldn’t you expect that anti-American continentals would support the most anti-American candidate? And there’s no way Obama would have bombed that reactor, since he was named after it by his father Saddam. So Cohen’s train of thought makes sense to me.

I think Obama seems very early Blair. Very charismatic and good at giving lots of speeches about hope and so on. If I were trying to explain British scepticism, I’d remember that they’ve been burnt by that sort of thing once before.

Retrospectively, wasn’t the bombing of the Osirak reactor a pretty good thing? No one was hurt — as they would have been had the Israelis waited until the reactor was operational. And without the bombing, Saddam might well have had a nuclear weapon in 1991; as it was, he was only a couple of years away. That would have made the Gulf War a very different thing.

The opinion numbers are interesting. In 1990-91 British public opinion was more pro-Gulf War than US opinion, which was pretty evenly split. (Remember that close Senate vote.) Yet now, recalling an earlier event directly relevant to the Gulf War, British opinion is much less pro. I guess things change …

Еlegantly calibrated? L-o-l.

Is he really saying that supporting Obama is a measure of how “anti-American” someone is?

I hope I bump into Mr. Cohen sometime. I would like to give him some instruction in patriotism.

“the test of how anti-American people are? It is whether they support, retrospectively, Israel’s bombing of Saddam’s nuclear reactor”

Maybe he just got “America” and “Israel” confused in his head.

But giving him the benefit of the doubt, he could be saying that whether or not a country generally supports an “aggressive foreign policy” (he means preemptive defensive attacks) is a good predictor of whether or not the country is generally anti-American. (Which could make sense, but you’d wanna know what attitudes were before the Iraq invasion too).

And this “support for an aggressive foreign policy” could be measured (elegantly, by serious, decent, honest people of good faith) by a country’s support for Israel’s bombing of Iraq.

He offers no evidence that Britain is any different than the continentals in level of support for Obama. Nor why voting for Obama is the more anti-American choice. I guess if you love your country, you believe, after much soul-searching and very serious thought, that all its preemptive invasions are for the good.

Any foreigner who supports BushCo (and McSame) is objectively anti-American. (I’m only half-joking.)

And it’s not like Obama has said he would undertake similar unilateral military action in — oh, I don’t know, Pakistan or somewhere.

Anti-Americanism is unconscious jealousy of the American way of life

Actually, it’s not true. I find anti-American cultural stereotyping in Europe surprisingly well-natured and and definitely jealousy free. Believe it or not.

There is certainly no doubt, that Obama has experienced the dislike for American/British imperialistic policies, in a way that no member of the Washington/London foreign policy establishment has. For all those who think that recent US policy has been jolly on target, that would be considered to be an indicator of a potential traitor. For the rest of us, and most of the world, it would be a long awaited breath of fresh air.

How I managed to figure that out from all the way over here, I’ll never know.

There is an argument that Iraq shifted its nuclear efforts from the reactor->plutonium->gun-type route to the centrifuge->HEU->implosion device route after the Osirak raid and therefore made faster progress afterwards, but I don’t feel qualified to evaluate it.

I think Obama seems very early Blair. Very charismatic and good at giving lots of speeches about hope and so on. If I were trying to explain British scepticism, I’d remember that they’ve been burnt by that sort of thing once before.

Three times, apparently. In succession.

Those crazy Brits…

ginger yellow@28: agreed that the lineage is different. But if there’s an equivalent to ‘Clause 4’, it might be ‘hawkishness’, and the idea that you can run a campaign without trying to out-hawk the GOP (see: 2004).

One irony, given the idiotic ‘Obama the Muslim’ shit flying around in email: Blair was pretty much a Catholic in pectore throughout his time as PM.

In all seriousness, I’m with abb1: the amin effect of a successful Iraqi nuclear program would have been no US invasion. Which everyone here, I think, agrees would be a better state of the world to be in.

Given that enormous destruction caused by US military interventions abroad, and the lack of international instituions capable of preventing them, it’s not only natural but quite desirable that “rogue nations” acquire nuclear deterrents. As an American I can honestly say that the more “outlaw” states have nuclear weapons the safer I’ll feel, because the fewer wars my country is likely to find itelf in.

It’s not just “the enormous destruction caused by US military interventions abroad” but the global destruction caused by European colonial interventions abroad, of which American military interventions are the current extension of five centuries of European policy, that motivate the rest of the (non-European) world to acquire their own deterrents. So yeah, I can see how the Mongol hordes (rogue nations) in Russia, China, Pakistan, India and Korea might feel marginally more secure with deterrence, given the record of its use and the rationale expressed to justify it.