http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/02/25/do2501.xml
Back in 1999, 83 per cent of British people surveyed by the State Department Office of Research said that they had a favourable opinion of the United States. But by 2006, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, that proportion had fallen to 56 per cent. British respondents to the Pew surveys now give higher favourability ratings to Germany (75 per cent) and Japan (69 per cent) than to the United States - a remarkable transformation in attitudes, given the notorious British tendency to look back both nostalgically and unforgivingly to the Second World War.
It's also very striking that Britons recently polled by Pew regard the US presence in Iraq as a bigger threat to world peace than Iran or North Korea (a view which is shared by respondents in France, Spain, Russia, India, China and throughout the Middle East).Nor is Britain the only disillusioned ally. Perhaps not surprisingly, two thirds of Americans believe that their country's foreign policy considers the interests of others. But this view is shared by only 38 per cent of Germans and 19 per cent of Canadians. More than two thirds of Germans surveyed in 2004 believed that American leaders wilfully lied about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction prior to the previous year's invasion, while a remarkable 60 per cent expressed the view that America's true motive was "to control Middle Eastern oil". Nearly half (47 per cent) said it was "to dominate the world".
