History and psychology are all of a piece. In particular, I believe the UK as a nation has lingering delusions of imperial grandeur that are poisoning its relations with other nations and undermining its own society. I would term the UK, as a has-been maritime power, the new Portugal, but I think that's an insult to Portugal, which long ago had the good grace to abandon the imperial reflexes that the UK still displays on a regular basis -- ranging from the comic-opera absurdity of the Falklands War to the ever-worsening world-class debacle of Iraq.
There is no question that the US bears main responsibility for Iraq, but the UK has acted as a goad and enabler throughout this nightmare. In the prelude to the Iraq war and in its early stages, hoity-toity Tony Blair conferred a legitimacy that this criminal enterprise would not have possessed if it had been carried out solely by the palpably thuggish Americans. And let us not forget the role that has been played by top-drawer British intellectuals like Niall Ferguson and Christopher Hitchens, who have been leading purveyors of rationalization for a new age of imperialism as well as consistent cheerleaders of the war on Iraq. They follow in the grand tradition of celebrated noisy drunk Winston Churchill, who in the early 1920s considered using mustard gas on Iraqis as crowd control. Astonishingly, Churchill claimed to believe that mustard gas -- the most lethal of all WWI gasses --caused only temporary incapacitation; the truth, quite clearly, is that he didn't give a shit.
Churchill's mentality is what haunts Britons to this day. The notion that they have some sort of God-given right to toy with the lives of other peoples is the detonator that set off the bombs in the London subway.
Carl