UPI COLUMNIST JIM BENNETT WRITES, in a column explicitly inspired by this post on Samizdata:

Three years ago, I was present at a vociferous argument between Margaret Thatcher and a retired American general who was a strong Europhile. The general maintained that Germany was America’s strongest and most important ally, while Britain’s aid was essentially worthless. Today nobody could advance such an argument with a straight face.

Interestingly enough, Tim Hames, writing in the Times of London on Friday, summarized recent British poll results on Iraq. Opposition to Britain fighting is most concentrated in the trendy, higher-income brackets; support for fighting is strongest in Middle England. The Chelsea neighborhood so full of quiet proofs of solidarity on Sept. 11 was in fact the heart of the trendier, higher-income parts of England.

Perhaps the polls today are no more meaningful than the famous Oxford vote prior to the Second World War, a vote of the same sort of elites, not to fight Hitler. After all, the same Oxford students went readily to fight when it became clear that appeasement of thugs does not work.

I suspect that Sept. 11 and its consequences will be part of a longer-term set of changes in the world. The strength of the comments of a random set of Americans to an impromptu memorial by a random collection of Brits reinforces my belief that an emerging Anglosphere will be part of those changes.

Quite a few people are saying so.