Time for Britain to Cut the Tie with America as Well

Having announced our intention to formally remove ourselves from the European Union, I hope that in future a British government will take steps to cut the Gordian Knot that binds us to the United States.

The "special relationship" referred to by David Cameron in the House of Commons today appears to be extremely one-sided. The current US President feels free to lecture British people about the merits of remaining subject to the control of an unelected, unaccountable European Commission, warning us that in the event of us ending that control we would lose out on future trade agreements with the United States.

I hope we do. I am sure this country could do a lot better by cutting loose from protectionist America which ensures that every deal it does benefits its own people at the expense of everyone else. Britain has paid off the Lend-Lease debt imposed by the United States during World War 2. Since then we have spent mega billions buying into American nuclear missile systems that we are never likely to use and all for the benefit of American armaments manufacturers.

American bankers and market traders wrecked the economies of the West in 2007/8, making fortunes for themselves by dealing in mortgages that were virtually worthless, bequeathing us budgetry austerity ever since. Thanks guys. You sure know how to treat your allies.

And now we know that a former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, told former President George W Bush, a year before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, that he, Blair, was "with him all the way." And he was. In Iraq, then in Afghanistan. Six hundred and thirty-two British service personnel came back from those places in coffins. Hundreds more returned in wheelchairs.

Tony Blair evidently decided that Bush junior needed support in his attempt to live up to his father, George senior, and glorify his presidency with the laurels of military victory. I heard Blair apologists say today that in 2003 Iraq's President Saddam Hussein was a dangerous unknown quantity who, following 9/11, might supply Islamic terror groups with stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

Britain and the United States probably supplied Saddam with the technology between 1980-88 when, on their behalf, he sent his soldiers against the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was their regional ally. Al Qaeda was never active in Iraq when he was in power. That only happened two or three years after the American-led coalition invasion in 2003.

Go back a bit futher if you like to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by the former USSR, the time-scale of which almost exactly parallels the Iraq-Iran War. If the United States had not poured millions of dollars as well as weapons of massive destruction into Afghanistan (via Pakistan) to equip and train the mujahidin, the whole bloody mess that followed, and which prevails today, might not have happened. One of the consequences of that particular insurgency was the formation of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group of trans-national Islamic fighters.

In short the United States helped to create the state of the world that now exists between Afghanistan and Africa by meddling in matters of no long-term interest to Washington. My last American hero was not President J F Kennedy but General George Marshall without whose plan, backed by about 17 billion dollars, much of Western Europe would not have so rapidly recovered after World War 2.

There was no such long-sighted, well-funded, plans for either Afghanistan or Iraq. I wouldn't be surprised if George W Bush had never heard of George Marshall. Do US presidents, as a rule, understand that other countries of the world do not exist specifically for the purpose of supporting the economic/political/military interests of America?

I dare say I won't see Britain cut the tie with the Star Spangled banner in my lifetime. But then I thought that about the European Union.