George,

It seems President George Bush and Britain’s Tony Blair are suffering from a bad case of Iraqi Fever, a disease that breaks out when the overwhelming majority of your countrymen can no longer stand the sight of you.

This Anglo-American comedy team which four years ago regarded the invasion of Iraq as something of a joke isn’t laughing today.

Blair’s team ran third in Britain’s local elections, garnering only 26% of the vote, compared to 40% for the Conservatives. All UK wants to know when Blair will step aside for Gordon Brown. As for 71% of Americans, 2008 can’t some soon enough. As Patrick Henry once said of a man, “As he rose like the rocket, he fell like the stick.” Plop! Plop!

If Blair is sickly today, maybe it’s because he swallowed Bush’s cooked books intelligence about the Iraq threat, a meal that also killed off the political career of Yankee General Colin Powell.

That whopper, though, doesn’t begin to compare with Bush’s tall tale about Iran. Does the occupant of the White House, who just increased his military-intelligence budget to $500-billion, expect the world to believe that Iran, which spends $3.5-billion a year on defense, is a threat to America?

Or America, with its 10,000 deliverable nuclear warheads, is a-tremble as Iran might develop one nuke five years down the road, assuming, of course, it can find a delivery system? Once again, Bush must be joking, right?

Writing last year of the “special relationship” between British and American leaders, John O’Sullivan, editor-at-large of “National Review” recalled: “These political partnerships have been both warm and productive while often cutting across the usual divisions of left and right: the Tory Churchill and the Democrat FDR; the Tory Macmillan and the Democrat Kennedy; the Labour Wilson and the Democrat LBJ; the Tory Thatcher and the Republican Reagan; and now, famously, the New Labor Blair and the Republican George W. Among the achievements of the special relationship are the victories in the Second World War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Falklands War, the Gulf War, and the Cold War.”

Note Editor O’Sullivan doesn’t list Iraq in the same sentence as an “achievement” by the Bush/Blair Axis of Comedy.

What we’ve got today might be called the United States of England. America may be a separate entity politically and geographically from UK, but it carries forward the spirit of the imperial British Empire of old.

Maybe we should regard the American Revolution in a new light: sort of an internal adjustment where predominantly English-speaking Colonists won the same rights to govern and plunder as their relatives who stayed home?

About the same time Britannia was dispatching Redcoats to shoot Africans who refused to pay tribute, Americans were dispatching blue coats to kill Native Americans courageous enough to defend their territory.

Just as the Crown took over India by force and violence, Americans employed like tactics to relieve good neighbor Mexico of half its territory.

Another similarity: Reading telegrams of victory from her generals, Queen Victoria would express her sorrow for the men lost in battle. Today, Commander-in-Chief Bush says much the same about those killed in Iraq.

By World War One, America and UK teamed up to reign in Germany’s colonial ambitions. Again, in World War II, they repeated the performance against Hitler, sharing intelligence and jointly developing the atomic bomb.

After WWII, the U.S. and Great Britain, joined by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, organized an intelligence-gathering club that provided them both military and economic information to advance their vital interests---- an arrangement that exists to this day. Militarily, they act as one.

In his book, “Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World” (Vintage, 2003), author Mark Curtis writes that, with UK’s support for terrorism, “violating international law has become as British as afternoon tea.” According to a review of his work in Guardian Unlimited of July 5, 2003:

“Drawing on formerly secret government files, he analyses not only Britain's role in recent events in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, but also British complicity in the slaughter of a million people in Indonesia in 1965; the depopulation of the island of Diego Garcia; the overthrow of governments in Iran and British Guiana; and repressive colonial policies in Kenya, Malaya and Oman. He relentlessly peels away layers of deception until, with the aid of painstaking research and analysis of declassified files, he (Curtis) lays bare in graphic detail a shocking exposé of British aggression and double-standards.”

Washington-based author Bill Blum (“Rogue State,” Common Courage Press), has exposed much the same about US policies. How is that, today, large majorities in both nations reject the policies of those they elected? Perhaps it is because their heads of state are serving mercantile and military elites rather than the general public. Perhaps that is why the given reasons for the war were not the real reasons.

Bush and Blair may leave office reviled men but their disgrace will not undo the awful toll in blood and treasure they have exacted from Iraq and their own publics. Nor will it change the quest for Empire by the United States of England, an imperial war machine that might be better off junked.

Sherwood Ross (electronic mail, May 16, 2006)