Loyalty Is A One-Way Street

Under HLIC (head lapdog in charge) Tony Blair, Great Britain did absolutely everything that the Bush Administration wished, and covered for the disastrous policy in Iraq. Now that Gordon Brown is in charge, and he clearly doesn't share the same neocon ideology (and he wants to get elected at some point, so he's keeping his distance from Bush), British policies are changing. They're withdrawing from Iraq rapidly. And the White House is peeved, so they're lashing out, not at Brown's judgment, but the performance of their armed forces:

“There’s concern about Brown,” a senior White House foreign policy official told The Daily Telegraph. “But this is compensated by the fact that Paris and Berlin are much less of a headache. The need to hinge everything on London as the guarantor of European security has gone.”

The White House official added that Britain would always be “the cornerstone” of US policy towards Europe but there was “a lot of unhappiness” about how British forces had performed in Basra and an acceptance that Mr Brown would pull the remaining 4,500 troops out of Iraq next year.

“Operationally, British forces have performed poorly in Basra,” said the official. “Maybe it’s best that they leave. Now we will have a clear field in southern Iraq.”

I eagerly await the reoslution of censure in the British House of Parliament for the White House's slander of their fighting men and women. Of course, if you're Republican, it's OK to defame the troops (and it's doubly OK to censor any rebuttals to that slander). If you're a Democrat, it calls for immediate action (even if it's not actually slander).

It's pretty disgraceful for the US to drop their most loyal ally because they won't set the same course for the center of the sun. Indeed, the relations are now quite frosty.

There has been a notable reduction in contact between Downing Street and the White House since Mr Blair left and US officials have remarked on how few British ministers have visited Washington in recent months.

Mr Brown and Mr Bush are understood to have spoken twice by telephone in three months since they met at Camp David in June, whereas Mr Blair and Mr Bush held video-link conferences, often weekly.

....A British diplomatic source said: "In the White House there's a sense of enormous change from Blair. They used to be on the phone to Blair all the time and that's no longer the case because Brown clearly wants to be the unBlair."

Of course, this fits in with the Bush definition of ally: a country that agrees with me wholly and completely. Anyone else is an enemy. With us or agin' us.

UPDATE: Here's an example of how that plays out.

Bush is a classic insecure authoritarian who imposes humiliating tests of obedience on others in order to prove his superiority and their inferiority. In 1999, according to Draper, at a meeting of economic experts at the Texas governor's mansion, Bush interrupted Rove when he joined in the discussion, saying, "Karl, hang up my jacket." In front of other aides, Bush joked repeatedly that he would fire Rove. (Laura Bush's attitude toward Rove was pointedly disdainful. She nicknamed him "Pigpen," for wallowing in dirty politics. He was staff, not family -- certainly not people like them.) [...]

At a political strategy meeting in May 2004, when Matthew Dowd and Rove explained to him that he was not likely to win in a Reagan-like landslide, as Bush had imagined, he lashed out at Rove: "KARL!" Rove, according to Draper, was Bush's "favorite punching bag," and the president often threw futile and meaningless questions at him, and shouted, "You don't know what the hell you're talking about."

Those around him have learned how to manipulate him through the art of flattery. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld played Bush like a Stradivarius, exploiting his grandiosity. "Rumsfeld would later tell his lieutenants that if you wanted the president's support for an initiative, it was always best to frame it as a 'Big New Thing.'" Other aides played on Bush's self-conception as "the Decider." "To sell him on an idea," writes Draper, "aides were now learning, the best approach was to tell the president, This is going to be a really tough decision." But flattery always requires deference. Every morning, Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, greets Bush with the same words: "Thank you for the privilege of serving today."

Apparently, Gordon Brown isn't whispering the right sweet nothings.