There is a great deal to criticise about Bush. While the Bush administration has been impressive in it's use of military force, it has been incredibly incompetent both in diplomacy and in running postwar Iraq. Afghanistan is no more reassuring.

Add the grand finale of Lynndie England and her pals at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere and you have an unbelieveably large and ignorant target to aim at.

Europeans tend to say that it has nothing to do with the US, but everything to do with an administration that has never attracted so much European loathing. The explosion of anti-US feelings in Europe is perhaps the earliest crude expression that the destinies of Europe and the US have finally gone their two ways.

While Europe beomes increasingly secular, the US lurches towards religeous fanaticism; repeals on abortion, removal of financial support for overseas charitable birth control agencies, the increasing rejection of science through, for example, the theory of evolution and the embrace of creationism are just a few more obvious examples of cultural digression.

While Europe maintains, possibly through its old empires, a keen knowledge of what happens outside its borders, the US remains self absorbed and cheerfully ignorant about the world outside it.

While Europe has abandoned the death penalty for its citizens, the US continues to execute its own and use this as a political tool especially during election years. Such percieved barbarity in Europe prevents EU members from deporting terrorist suspects to the US because of its Court of Human rights, namely that no State in the Union has the right to kill its civilians.

While Europe pursuses diplomacy and persuasion, as witnessed in the apparent reform of Libya, the US now pursues a doctrine of pre-emptive war on the flimsiest of, and as it turns out, incorrect evidence.

The European electorate cares about whether its governments have misled them, as witnessed in Italy, Spain and Britain who have made their voices heard.

The US electorate hardly seems to be bothered, choosing instead to wrap itself in a flag of self-congratulatory ignorance.

Europe wants an even handed approach to solving the Israel/Palestine conflict, the US just kow-tows to whatever Israel demands and does.

Europe wants a communitaire approach to global issues such as Kyoto, Land mine treaties, biological and chemical weapon treaties, the militarisation of space, the international criminal court, nuclear proliferation to name but a few.

The US says two fingers to the rest of the world we do what we want because we can, as evidenced by its disgraceful pursuit of even more sophisticated nuclear weapons condemned recently by the mayor of Hiroshima on the 50th anniversary of the nucelar bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US is still the only country to have used nuclear weapons in history and shows every intention of doing so again with its new small thermonuclear device programme.

And finally, Europe has respect for human rights, international law and the Geneva convention.

The US arrests people arbitrarily and holds them without charge and without access to legal representation. It arrests and deports critical foreign journalists.

It tortures, rapes and murders prisoners in their charge and throws a few show trials when found out. It ignores the Geneva convention at its whim. It frequently breaches international law and uses bombs and bullets against innocent people to achieve its dubious and often impenetrable ends while shrieking 'democracy' as it trails failed state after failed state behind it. Afghanistan, Iraq - where next?

An overstretched US miltary recently announced that it was to reduce troop numbers in Germany and South Korea, to make up the blooody defecit being guzzled in the dusty quagmire of Iraq. Troops that were promised they would be home are now on extended duty. The National Guard is dangerously extended back in the US as it loses its sherrifs, deputies, prison guards and fire fighters to an already lost war in Iraq.

As troops are also withdrawn from Germany, some European countries are now thinking something the US would be very uncomfortable about, the formation of a European army, to counter the excesses of future US expansionism.

Apart from trade, it seems that there is increasingly little common gorund between Disneyland America and 'old' Europe. Even that arch Mickey Mouse character, Rumsfeld, must be rueing his words when he praised 'new' europe such as Poland. 70% of Poles want their troops home and see no point in supporting a morally corrupt and foolish American administration.

The US, backed foolishly by the UK, have made their bed in Iraq. Now they must lie in it.

Alone, together.

yechydda,