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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Another view from England.

• For my own part, whenever I'm speechifying in America, I get asked far more questions about Gertrude Bell and General Allenby than about, oh, Mo Mowlam and Robin Cook. The reason is obvious. When you look at the current hotspots of the Islamist threat — Iraq, the Khyber Pass, Kashmir, the West Bank, Sudan — America is spending a lot of time mopping up the failures of British imperialism — or, to be more charitable, of late-period fag-end fainthearted British imperialism.
  
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  After 9/11, I wasted many months urging formal imperialism on the Americans. The hands-off approach — "He may be a sonofabitch but he's our sonofabitch" — gave us the House of Saud and most of our present troubles. Better to kit out the chaps from the Beltway think-tanks in solar topees and ostrich feathers and make American imperialism an administrative reality. It could hardly get a worse press than the informal, cultural imperialism of hamburgers and "Dude, Where's My Car?" that provoked Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the former French defence minister, to claim America was dedicated to "the organised cretinisation of our people". Might as well make the cretinisation more organised, I'd say.