Tory chief lashes out at US policy

[KashifAsrar]

Tory chief lashes out at US policy

Cameron’s Speech Shows First Rift Between Bush Administration & Major British Party


Rashmee Roshan Lall | TNN



London: Fresh from visiting India, his first foreign tour since becoming prime minister-inwaiting and leader of Britain’s main opposition party, David Cameron used 9/11’s fifth anniversary to criticise America’s arrogant foreign policy.
Cameron, who delivered his first substantial address on foreign and security policy on Monday, pointedly said he was “a liberal Conservative rather than a neo-Conservative” and opened up the first clear area of difference between the Bush administration and a major British political party.
Warning the US that he was troubled “how many people, not just in countries affected by war and instability, but here in the West, here in Britain, regard America as the world’s worst power”.
Cameron, whose Conservative Party has traditionally taken a slavishly loyal approach to America and its foreign policy, warned that America and the West had to move on from the “easy soundbites” that has have passed for foreign policy in the last five years.
The attack — on a day symbolically significant for a wounded America five years after 9/11 — is seen as an important change in the British political climate with respect to the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Prime minister Tony Blair has supported this to the hilt.
Insisting that humility and patience have been missing from US foreign policy in the past five years, the Conservative’s new young leader said, “These are not warlike words. They are not so glamorous and exciting as the easy soundbites we have grown used to in recent years. But these soundbites had the failing of all foreign policy designed to fit into a headline. They were unrealistic and simplistic.”
The attack on alleged American hubris in handling foreign policy in the years since 9/11 is seen as Cameron's first attempt to put a clear distance between Blair's governing Labour and his own party on the controversial issue of the war on terror.
Blair has long been criticised for being needlessly slavish and poodle-like in his relationship with president Bush and the US after 9/11. Cameron, who is increasingly conscious that UK voter opinion polls are giving the Conservatives a clear lead, is thought to be anxious to stress his party’s independent approach to foreign policy.
But Cameron also added that it was important not to allow anti-Americanism to grow. Describing anti-Americanism as “intellectual and moral surrender” and “complacent cowardice”, Cameron said it is important to “recognise something else — that our attempts to meet these challenges have had an unintended and deeply worrying consequence. They have fanned the flames of anti-Americanism.”
Insisting that his party is an “instinctive friend of America and passionate supporter of the Atlantic Alliance”, Cameron said that this does not preclude speaking out about the need for a “tough and effective foreign policy…a policy that moves beyond neo-conservatism, retaining its strengths but learning from its failures”.
Cameron’s extraordinary criticism of American policy on an emotionally-charged day came as Britain joined the US in marking the fifth anniversary of 9/11 attacks. Meanwhile, much of Europe offered a near-universal denunciation of the so-called war on terror.
Though the media in Britain, America’s closest ally in the war on terror, adopted a divided view of 9/11’s aftermath with Middle England’s leading paper, the prevailing tone is despair over American policy. The Daily Telegraph argued that the UK and US have helped to promote the very thing they were trying to prevent.