Is Obama anti-British?

Dan Hanna’s polemic in the DT this week asks whether Obama is antiBritish, and opens...


‘Let’s review the evidence. President Obama received from Gordon Brown a pen-holder made from the timbers of a Royal Navy anti-slavery vessel, and reciprocated with DVDs. He silkily downgraded the UK from “our closest ally” to “one of our allies”. He gave the Queen an iPod full of his own speeches. He used the Louisiana oil spill to attack an imaginary company called “British Petroleum” (it has been BP for the past decade, ever since the merger with Amoco gave it as many American as British shareholders). He sent a bust of Winston Churchill back to the British Embassy. He managed, on his visit to West Africa, to refer to the struggle for independence, but not to the Royal Navy’s campaign against slavery. He has refused to acknowledge our presence in Afghanistan in any major speech. He has even come dangerously close to backing Peronist Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands. There’s no getting away from it: Barack Obama doesn’t much like Limeys.


What has he got against us? The conventional answer is that he is bitter about the way his grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was interned during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya........'


This is the take by Texas Haymaker.

I did not know that O's grandfather was imprisoned during the Mau Mau uprising. There must be more to the story seeing as how Mau Mau was a Kikuyu age cult that had nothing to do with the Onyangas, Obamas and other Luo people.

No apologies for the faux pas committed by O with respect to gifting your dignitaries with undignified presents. As for his anti-colonialism, so what? The vast majority of Americans are anti-colonial and this vast majority most likely understands colonial dynamics as poorly as O does.

Perhaps naively, but I found O's approach to foreign policy refreshing. Yet his efforts to promote discourse and understanding were vilified by his predecessors who treated North Korean, Iranian and Venezuelan leaders to name a few as lepers. Is it sophomoric to deliver the message that Americans are not the bad guys that people might think? Hannan takes umbrage with this approach and in his article rapidly chronicles who and where we bombed since our independence.

These are small points that do not focus on the main issue; America's relationship with the UK. Believe me , it is healthy and we continue to look kindly on your lot over there. Anyone who speaks with an English accent (and to us that includes South Africans, Australians and New Zealanders) has immediate respect and credibility. Don't ask me why. Our TV and radio commercials are chuck full of promoters of this product and that speaking at us in accents ranging from posh to Cockney. We love it. I often wonder what the impact would be if an American-accented person were to attempt flogging the latest brand of tooth paste in the UK.

O and other Yanks criticized British strategies in Iraq and Iran. If I recall, so did Ike and his general staff during WWII and I could go back further. Your bright red uniforms with white straps across the chest and lines of soldiers made easy targets for our colonial lads in the bush. A lesson, I might add, that we have forgotten when it comes to guerilla warfare. Yes, we have different styles of warfare. We also have different health care and education systems. Any one of these systems, I have learned the hard way, should be off-limits for intercultural discussion as they are pregnant with emotion.

I am confident that when Daniel Hannan matures a bit, his views will moderate and he will cease and desist promoting the rumor that the UK and USA are at serious odds with one another. If he has any doubts about the relationship, ask him to count the number of American TV viewers intently following the forthcoming royal wedding. Ask him why the UK is the prime area of interest to US tourists going to Europe and to US businessmen seeking investments and partnerships. No doubt Hannan would have preferred that our umbilical cord to the UK had never been severed, but, as the saying goes, the acorn never falls far from the tree. It is not how different we are that distracts me, but how much the same we are that I find so intriguing. We're all right ,Jack, and the affection still swells in our collective breasts when we hear the words of Winston Churchill and refrains from God Save the Queen.