Why are so many thousands on the streets of London so furious at an American President and the ongoing war in Iraq? Let us examine their misguided reasons, before getting to the truth.

The animus cannot be over the demise of Saddam Hussein. His regime killed more than two million citizens in three decades of state-sponsored murder and wars. For liberal Westerners the end of the Baathists, despite the current chaos of reconstruction, means no more attacks against neighbouring countries. The destruction of the Marsh Arabs and their fragile habitat has ended. British and American pilots are no longer engaged in a 12-year, 350,000-sortie effort to patrol Iraqi airspace to prevent further genocide. A brutal UN embargo that punished Iraqi citizens for the crimes of the Baathists is over.

Is it that protesters are angry at America’s purportedly cavalier treatment of Muslims? Are they ignoring that over 20 years we have helped to expel Stalinists from Islamic Afghanistan, led the effort to restore Muslim Kuwait, fed Muslims in Somalia and bombed Christians to preserve Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia? We give more than $3 billion a year to the Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians to match our aid to Israel.

Do they think it a bad thing that Noriega, Milosevic and the Taleban are gone? Whatever the endemic cynicism over US aims, the “national liberation” mantra of the 1960s seems close to realisation, if the nascent democratic movements in Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq are any indication. The demonstrators should at least harbour no sympathy for our enemy’s agenda: the fundamentalists’ treatment of women, homosexuals, religious dissidents and ethnic minorities is from the Dark Ages.

Are the protesters repulsed at a “new” American preemption? If so, we in America do not remember that Hitler first sent V2s to our shores or that Milosevic cleansed Americans before we sent planes over their skies to stop the butchery. In the recent Balkan conflict Americans thought European omission, not American commission, allowed the loss of 250,000 lives a few hours from Berlin and Paris.

Mr Bush’s Christianity, cowboy metaphors, and drawl might grate on European sensitivities. But he sought approval of the US Senate and went to the UN before attacking Saddam, unlike a lip-biting Bill Clinton, who bombed the Balkans, Africa and Iraq without either national or multinational sanction. And, by the terrible arithmetic of war, the Anglo-American effort to defeat the worst regime in the Middle East has been remarkable in its efforts to minimise casualties, both ours and Iraqi.

In fact, the rage of so many Europeans against America has more fundamental roots. The world onslaught of our culture remains a deep sore, whose scab Iraq has ripped off. But such a strange anger. American popular culture from jeans to rap and fast food is simply a manifestation of an inclusive democracy, just what the protesters, both in their slogans and appearance, might seem to appreciate.

Indeed our music, fashion, entertainment and technology require few prerequisites for participation and spread precisely because people from all backgrounds and nations find common ground in easily acquired tastes and appetites. So Starbucks and McDonald’s are not promulgated through gunboats, but are a result of the choices of free consumers. Disruptive globalisation is a source of legitimate concern, but the poor from China to Mexico seem to be better fed, housed and cared for through the adoption of open markets than was true under Mao or state socialism.

Far more likely the shrillness of the London protest reflects the mood of the new Western citizen; the most affluent and privileged individual in the history of civilisation, who, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, can afford to find patriotism, civic militarism and the singularity of Western culture all so passé. In an era when the horrors of the Somme, the Great Depression, the Jewish Holocaust and even SS10 Soviet nukes are dim memories, we have riches and unrivalled freedom. So we demand perfection, expecting that we can stop racism, class oppression, sexism and environmental desecration as quickly and easily as we can find information on the internet or communicate across the globe.

In this unrealistic view of the perfectibility of human nature, far from being appreciative of our fragile peace, accomplishments and luck, well-off Westerners demand more. Furious over our perceived failures, we equate the pathologies of man exclusively with the sins of an all-powerful West, especially those of its most powerful nation as it is symbolised now by George Bush.

America reads daily about this growing anti-American sentiment and I wonder whether those abroad stop to ponder the effect of all this easy invective on those of us who live here. Americans as never before are re-examining all the old alliances and friendships, from troops in Europe and bases in the Mediterranean to peacekeepers in the Balkans and ships in the Gulf. If privileged Western protesters cannot tell the difference between what Saddam did and what America is trying to do in Iraq, if they think that tomorrow’s Saddams, Milosevics and Kim Jong Ils will be awed by Nobel Prize awards, barristers in The Hague and EU resolutions rather than aircraft carriers, or if they assume in their end-of-history world that their worship of reason is equally shared by all those outside the West, we may be soon entering a far scarier world, when America in exasperation — as it did for most of its history before the European wars — will simply shrug and say: “Good luck to you all.”

The author is a senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University. His latest book is Ripples of Battle.

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