Band wagon Dave

I am rapidly growing to despise Mr David Cameron.

Yesterday he showed his great taste, diplomacy and sense of timing by choosing to use the 5th anniversary of the mass murder of thousands of Americans to ... wait for it ... try to put distance between himself and America.

What a tawdry little man.

The wording was of course mealey mouthed but the intention was clear: "there's votes in them there bleeding heart liberal middle class dinner party set hills and our boy Dave is driving his bandwagon straight for towards them."

"democracy cannot quickly be imposed from outside" ... "Liberty grows from the ground - it cannot be dropped from the air by an unmanned drone" he says, though strangely liberty was quite sucessfully dropped from the air by Lancasters over a number of German cities and a single B29 over Hiroshima, both of which embraced democracy and freedom quite enthusiastically despite the aerial delivery method.

"Foreign policy decisions are not black and white" he says. Some of them are not but most of the ones in the last five years have been. You are either in favour of overthrowing the Taliban and Saddam and replacing them with democracies or you are not. I am not aware of a middle way for "liberal Conservatives" like Mr Cameron to pursue.

"We are not engaged in a clash of civilisations" he says. Er... you could afford me. I thought yesterday was the 5th anniversary of a bunch of jihadists who want to re-establish a global caliphate flying passenger planes into buildings. If the wars that are being fought in Afghanistan and Iraq - which are about whether those countries become muslim democracies that embrace the values of the enlightenment or slide into being mediaeval theocracies - are not a clash of civilisations I don't know what is.

Unlike Mr Cameron, while the war on terrorism goes on - and last night former CIA director James Woolsey was saying on Newsnight it might last as long as the Cold War - my support for America is unconditional and not hedged around with neat formulations and semantics.

We owe that country too much:

• We owe them for the lives of their young men who came and died in the mud of 1917 and 1918 because we were too exhausted to defeat German imperialism
• We owe them for the Lend Lease destroyers that stopped the U-Boats from starving our grandparents into defeat
• We owe them for the lives of a second generation of young men who rescued our continent from the Nazis
• We owe them for the Marshall Aid that rescued us from post War destitution and allowed us to fund an NHS and a welfare state
• We owe them for funding the 45 year defence of the West at a cost of billions, so that we are not all now living in a Stalinist worker's paradise
• We owe them for the lives of the young Americans now who are sitting terrified in humvees in Iraq or behind sandbags in Kabul trying to protect the fledgling democracies in those countries and - by extension - us

From the party that brought you Neville Chamberlain, step forward his ideological heir, David Cameron.