Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post was in France on 9/11, and in this column for the Daily Telegraph she writes about something I also saw in the days immediately after 9/11. The events she writes about occured in London, but I saw similar things in France, Germany, and Spain. Perhaps a little later in Germany's case - but not much later. I remember feeling at the time that I simply could not believe my ears. I still don't wish to - but I must, because it happened.

This is the reason why I see NATO as dead at it's heart. It's like an old oak whose heartwood has rotted away. It still produces leaves but is only alive until the next big windstorm breaks it into flinders.

"But it's also true that this initial wave of goodwill hardly outlasted the news cycle. Within a couple of days a Guardian columnist wrote of the "unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population". A Daily Mail columnist denounced the "self-sought imperial role" of the United States, which he said had "made it enemies of every sort across the globe".
That week's edition of Question Time featured a sustained attack on Phil Lader, the former US ambassador to Britain – and a man who had lost colleagues in the World Trade Centre – who seemed near to tears as he was asked questions about the "millions and millions of people around the world despising the American nation". At least some Britons, like many other Europeans, were already secretly or openly pleased by the 9/11 attacks.

And all of this was before Afghanistan, before Tony Blair was tainted by his friendship with George Bush, and before anyone knew the word "neo-con", let alone felt the need to claim not to be one.

The dislike of America, the hatred for what it was believed to stand for – capitalism, globalisation, militarism, Zionism, Hollywood or McDonald's, depending on your point of view – was well entrenched. To put it differently, the scorn now widely felt in Britain and across Europe for America's "war on terrorism" actually preceded the "war on terrorism" itself. It was already there on September 12 and 13, right out in the open for everyone to see."

Blair and Aznar stood against this hatred; Chirac and Schroeder pandered to it. From France this was no surprise but from Berlin it was simply shocking. Jaw-dropping. I watch whatever comes from Germany with a jaundiced eye today - but I did not on 9/11, 2001.

One more point. Shroeder didn't start the attitude; he detected it and pandered to it - repeatedly. Germany turned on the US post-9//11 because it's people wanted to!

And this: "I don't detect a similar desire in London or Berlin to rearrange priorities or to change the tone of national debate, let alone to forge a stronger alliance with the US or to engage in what ought to be a joint project.

In part, this is thanks to the extraordinary diplomatic failure of the Bush Administration, which, believing its military power entitled it to arrogance, spurned America's traditional alliances and launched a war in Iraq without making any preparations for the consequences. Although much of the past year has been spent making up lost ground, it's hard to see how this President, at least, is ever going to be able to build the kind of international coalition necessary to fight what will have to be an international war of ideas against radical fundamentalism.

But perhaps Europe's failure to enthusiastically join the "war on terrorism" was in some sense preordained. While not entirely incorrect, the notion that President Bush has wasted international post-9/11 sympathy is not entirely accurate either. As I say, at the time of the attacks, influential Europeans, and influential Britons, were already disinclined for their own reasons to sympathise with any American tragedy."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/09/12/do1202.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/09/12/ixopinion.html