ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES of spending a great deal of time in London is the opportunity to meet with Britain's prime minister from time-to-time, and to watch him in action through the eyes of the British media. Americans who have witnessed his performances in the press conferences that inevitably follow his visits to Washington and Crawford almost uniformly admire his eloquence and passion. But few appreciate the risks he is taking to support America's efforts to create a pacific, democratic and prosperous Iraq in the place of Saddam Hussein's hell-on-the-Euphrates.

President Bush does. Bob Woodward reports that the president feared that if Blair were to send troops to Iraq, his government would fall. So he offered his friend the opportunity of holding our coat rather than joining our assault. Blair declined the quite respectable role of "peacekeeper," and stood with us, bringing the fury of large segments of his own party and, a few weeks ago just as Parliament was rising for its summer recess, the leader of the Tories down on his head.

It is no secret that our president is wildly unpopular among Britain's chattering classes, as distinct from its far wiser cab drivers and John, my haircutter. With the notable exception of a few newspapers, the press and the BBC pour out anti-American vitriol that often makes Al Jazeera seem a paragon of objective reporting. The situation is so bad that the joke at No. 10 Downing Street--"joke," as in "you will laugh so hard that you will cry"--is that

To understand the depths of this Bush-hating anti-Americanism, let's get up close and personal, as I am told they say in Crawford. Which brings me to a dinner party my wife, Cita, and I attended in a fashionable London town house. The usual assortment of media folk, City (financial) types, and professionals, with the odd (very) member of Parliament. It was a group put together by a very gracious hostess and her very conservative husband. Sounds like fun. But, at least for pro-Bush, anti-Saddam Americans, it was the sort of evening that makes one long for a good dose of Fox News, followed by readings from the works of Donald Rumsfeld.

THE WAR ON TERROR, announces one guest, could have been avoided if the Americans hadn't invaded Iraq. But the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon--not to mention various embassy bombings and the assault on the Cole--preceded the invasion of Iraq, I noted, in a gentle effort to help this guest reorganize her calendar of events. Ah, but original sin, the event that preceded all of the ones I cited, is the Jews' beastly treatment of the Arabs.

We are gluttons for punishment, not to mention for wonderful puddings of the sort being set before us. So we decided that the guestly thing to do was to stifle our desire to leave, running the risk that continuing the discussion might result in the violent response many Brits assume comes naturally to gun-totin', SUV-drivin', Americans. (They couldn't work their God-fearing epithet into that litany, as it might have impelled us to turn the other cheek, which they for some strange reason don't expect of God-fearing Americans.)