DICKENS TO LE CARRÉ Smiley's (Anti-American) People
By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT
BATH, ENGLAND — Anyone can see what happened in Iraq. It was nothing more than a war of colonial conquest fought for oil, "dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty," and its authors were "a clique of war-hungry Judeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America's post-9/11 psychopathy."
These words are spoken in John Le Carré's new novel "Absolute Friends'' (Little, Brown, 2004). And although it is usually philistine and unfair to blame a novelist for what his fictional creations say, in this case the speaker expressing those opinions is plainly a point-of-view character - there is a vein of anti-Americanism running through his novels from nearly 40 years ago - and the opinions are shared by plenty of Europeans, the English among them.
... Le Carré ... has no very subtle political understanding, but .. all too accurately voices the bitterness of [UK] national impotence and decline.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/weekinreview/11whea.html>
Carl
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