[This is the headline over Ian Bell's Saturday Essay in The Herald. The following are excerpts.]
[T]hat dilapidated heirloom, the special relationship, is being disowned by Americans and their leaders. Like those extradition laws by which the US demands and Britain requests, it turns out to have been a one-way street. So do we fret, or move on?
Matters have been brought to a head by the Lockerbie row. The Americans are justifiably aggrieved and, simultaneously, in the wrong. Sir Christopher Meyer, former ambassador to Washington, attests that there was a "clear political and diplomatic understanding" in 1998 that, if convicted, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi would serve his time in a Scottish prison. Now we learn that, while Britain talked trade, Gordon Brown was conveying an entirely different message to the Libyans.
The Americans smell a rat. This is not how loyal allies, as defined in Washington, are supposed to behave. Yet neither the American media nor the US government have shown the slightest interest in examining the safety of Megrahi's conviction. In fact, the administration is facing legal action just to force the release of documents that could shed light on the case. As for compassion, the integrity of Scots law or the memory of recent services rendered, these are of no account.
The reaction towards "the Brits" in the American popular press has been contemptuous. According to the New York Daily News, the special relationship has "gone". Brown is a "betrayer". The Republican right, in particular, has reached for every cliche in the book covering effete, duplicitous, post-imperial losers. As with the recent fantastic propaganda traducing the NHS, not a thought has been given to British opinion. Who cares, after all?
In fact, evidence that Scots are split evenly over Megrahi's release, as demonstrated in yesterday's opinion poll, would only harden attitudes, were it ever to penetrate. Such signs of pathetic weakness, like the British Army's alleged inadequacies in the field, are no more than a certain sort of American has come to expect. The belief that Britain is held in wide esteem in the US is our delusion.
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