In a post entitled America and the Left, Ken Parish has returned to the theme that, in criticising the Bush Administration, I am taking an anti-American line. I should note before going any further, that Ken has posted a comment to the effect that he regrets the personal nature of his criticism. However, he doesn’t withdraw the basic claim that, if you oppose the foreign policy of the US government all or most of the time, you are anti-American.

As Ken correctly says, of US governments since 1960, the only ones whose foreign policy I agreed with were those of Carter and Clinton (I should add that my judgement of the Kennedy administration is purely retrospective. I’m just old enough to remember where I was when Kennedy was shot, but I’m pretty sure I’d never heard his name before that day).

I could quibble with this in a number of ways. For example, I’m on the record as an admirer of both Eisenhower and FDR, and I have mixed opinions about Truman, so if I can start the clock in 1932, I come out almost exactly neutral. If you add in domestic policy, where I admire LBJ, I can just about qualify as pro-American.

But the main point is that Ken’s whole position (one that is shared my many supporters of the current US Administration) is nonsensical. I’ve had strong opinions about Australian politics for over thirty years. For all but three of those years I’ve been more critical of the government than supportive (and even in those three years my feelings were mixed by the end). I’ve publicly attacked governments of both parties, week in and week out, for the last decade, and have been attacked with vigour in my turn. In that entire time, as far as I can recall, no-one has ever accused me of being anti-Australian or unAustralian, and I’m sure that no-one who made such a claim would be taken seriously.

A government, even a democratically-elected one, is not the same as the country it governs. Both citizens and non-citizens can oppose the policy of a government without being hostile to the country it governs