BARBARA AMIEL HAS RESPONDED TO MARGARET DRABBLE’S MOUTH-FOAMING OF LAST WEEK:

The key to understanding Drabble’s lunatic rant is her reaction to what she says she saw on CNN celebrating the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war. She describes an old, shabbily dressed Vietnamese man bartering for dollars. The horror of this moment – an “elderly, impoverished” Vietnamese man wanting that terrible currency, American dollars, for heaven’s sake – just put the lid on it for Drabble. She writes: “The Vietnamese had won the war, but had lost the peace.”

Well no, Miss Drabble. The Vietnamese fought the war for communism and they won communism. That, indeed, is why the old man is impoverished, shabbily dressed and bartering for dollars. In your deliberate obtuseness, you become blind to the most self-evident conclusions and an apologist for the appalling regimes that are so far removed from your ostensible values.

Forgetting the danger Saddam posed to those outside his borders, we have now seen that removing him from power cost fewer Iraqi lives than just one of his killing sprees. Would you have condemned the Iraqi people to another 12 years of Saddam’s murderous nightmare?

Are you too sophisticated for Coca-Cola and Disneyfication but not for Saddam’s garish palaces and his giant posters on every street corner? After Stalin, Hitler and Mao, this horrifying man probably captures fourth place in the great mass murderers’ list, or fifth after Pol Pot.

One is tempted to call this visceral anti-Americanism “the Drabble syndrome”, but she is neither the first nor the most prominent sufferer. You could as easily call it the Pinter syndrome and it certainly is the BBC syndrome.

It’s a serious illness, debilitating but, sadly, not fatal. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Here are more Brits speaking out against anti-Americanism.