"The Russians are a tough bunch of bastards"

That, at least, was Richard Nixon's verdict on November 1971.  His successors in office since 1989 would have done well to remember that.  The oafish, drunk, incompetent Boris Yeltsin was an exception and a national embarrassment to most Russians.  He is widely reviled for precipitating the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and facilitating the theft of the state's wealth by a small number of oligarchs.  The Clinton era is remembered in the US as the good times.  In Russia they were, for most people, a time frightening change and economic hardship, with a dose of national humiliation layered on top.

The years of the Bush administration saw better economic times in Russia, as Vladimir Putin brought a degree of stability to the country, but in foreign policy, the former KGB man Putin saw his country suffer (what were in his eyes) repeated indignities.  The US embarked on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  NATO and the EU's borders raced eastwards, pushing up against the Russian frontier itself.  The fruits of Clinton's air war against Serbia (Russia's long-standing friend and ally) were reaped by Kosovar independence.  George W barely missed an opportunity to kick the Russian bear in Poland, the Czech Republic and Georgia.  In the dying days of the crippled Bush presidency the bear gnarled, briefly, over the latter.

And while Obama and Secretary of State Clinon famously (embarrassingly now, looking back) tried to "reset" relations with Russia, preoccupied with Libya, Syria and a "pivot to Asia", when the Obama administration did pay attention to Europe, its focus was on the crisis in eurozone.

The G.O.P.: The Party of Fiscal Responsibility

As The Grauniad reports this morning, George Bush's Republican administration disembursed $12 billion in cash in Iraq in a period of less than 15-months. That's the kind of spending that even Victoria Beckham might be a little embarrassed over. What's more, the Coalition Provisional Authority appears to have learned its book-keeping practices from Colleen McLoughlin.

To quote the C.P.A. financial advisor who was asked what happened to $9 billion that was unaccounted for: "I have no idea. I can't tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn't - nor do I actually think it's important."

One of the many lessons of Vietnam that appears to have been forgotten is the enormous damage done to South Vietnamese society, and the war effort against the communists, when the country became awash in U.S. dollars accompanied by slack book-keeping and corruption. Huge amounts of money entered the black economy and ultimately ended up in the hands of the N.L.F., whereupon it was used to buy guns - often from South Vietnamese soldiers; and so the circle went round.

It begs the question how much money has Iran actually had to fork out to arm the insurgents, when bags of $2 million in cash were being doled out like sacks of rice?

Norfolk Blogger: The Sun shows video of US planes attacking UK troops - Are America really our ally of choice ?

There are a lot of very good reasons to question the value for the U.K. of having such a close relationship with the United States, but with all due respect to Nich Starling I am not sure that the matter of this video is one of them.

The U.S., particularly the military, have become very sensitive, if you pardon the turn of phrase, to the declassification of information in the wake of 9/11. In fact, so paranoid have the military and intelligence services become, that they have secretly reclassified 55,000 pages of documents that have been accessible in archives and in the public domain in other forms for years, in an effort to keep them from even the American people.

In Congress too, particularly in the Senate, there remains an streak that while not quite isolationist, certainly views with suspicion the supply of any arms or military technology to any foreign government - Britain included - partly because of concerns about information and/or technology leaking out; (this is one the resons why the fiction of Britain's 'independent nuclear deterrent is so proposterous: it is wholly dependent on American co-operation to make the thing work). This leak from within the MoD will not have helped to assuage such concerns.

Nich asserts that there is nothing on the tape that would pose a security risk: probably true, but then again we don't know whether that is wholly true because the upper left area of the video display has been edited to obscure what was originally underneath it. But what is important to remember is that unlike this country, which largely sees itself as a country in someone else's war, America sees itself as a country at war. Things weren't so different when Britain was at war. Go on ask your gran - "Dangerous talk costs lives!" "The walls have ears!"

Certainly the United States has dragged its feet over this whole affair, and IMHO there appears to be a legal case to answer given the catalogue of six failures to accord with the rules of engagement, and certainly the U.S. military must be embarrassed over this whole incident. But let's not get carried away about this, or forget that the British government was hardly falling over itself to secure prosecutions, convictions or even full sentences of soldiers who killed in Northern Ireland under questionable circumstances.

There are good reasons to have a critical reappraisal of "the special relationship", but this incident is small beer from the administration of Mr. "Yo Blair" Bush.