ASTONISHINGLY GOOD COVER STORY from Daniel Kruger in today's Spectator. His thesis is complex, but essentially he argues that the West as a whole is divided fundamentally into foxes and hedgehogs. The foxes, hippy-dippy postmodernist intellectuals who don't believe in objective truth or ethics - the sort of people who can't bring themselves to use the word 'wrong' without speech marks - are represented by France, Russia, Germany, Belgium, the UN and the EU. The hedgehogs, more simple and single-minded in their ideals, comfortable with certainty and moral truths, are represented by the United States, the UK, Israel, Australia and Canada and NATO. These camps have existed side-by-side for a long while, mainly because of hedgehog American military support for fox France. But that cannot go on:

We stand at a parting of the ways. The coming war with Iraq is going to decide which side goes forward to face the next great threat to the West. If it goes badly, the foxes win. If it goes well, the 1990s myth of a post-modern order - beyond power, beyond war - will be finished. The day of the hedgehog will dawn. He compares tomorrow's chief hedgehog - Bush's America - to that of the 19th Century - Queen Victoria's Britain, and sees a similar role for her. This role is the assertion of liberty, democracy and the rule of law - the morally superior values that prevail in the West but are the right of all. Just as the British Empire saw its duty as the enforcement of its ban on slavery, America's role is to fight for these values across the world, exterminating terrorists and stopping rogue states just as Britain used the Royal Navy to smash the slave trade. Neo-colonialism, he says, is America's future.

A DAY AND A HALF after it was revealed, I still find it hard to believe that the business contracts for the rebuiling of post-war Iraq have all been given to American companies. It isn't that the war itself has not yet begun that concerns me - planning for after it is over is just sensible forward-thinking. It is the blazen disregard for a loyal ally, and indeed for Iraq itself, which surely can be better served by a greater variety of countries bidding to offer the best services. On what authority were such decisions made? Doesn't the next Iraqi government deserve a say?

Such actions are not only indefensible and petty, but they help put skin on the bones of paranoid conspiracy theories about the war being fought for the sake of US business interests. Just as these were finally being shown for the nonsense we knew them to be, every opponent of war is armed with a fresh arsenal of argument and some solid evidence.

I do not doubt for a moment that this war is right, but this incident alone has made me ask myself why Britain should not merely give America what America gave us as we fought the Battle of Britain single-handedly - our best wishes. Certainly, ending the Baathist Socialist regime in Iraq and disarming its weapons of mass destruction is in Britain's national interest. But if the United States is going to do this anyway, why not allow them, support them and stay out?

I suppose part of the answer is Britain's excellent training and special forces, which are of particular use where brute force and military might are not as effective as something more subtle. We can potentially make this war less bloody for the allies and end it more quickly. And by giving our help and making this an international force that is disarming Saddam, we show ourselves again to be the closest friends of the leading world superpower, which can only be a good thing.

But incidents like these do shake me, and make me ask rationally just what we gain from the special relationship. America's support made an immense difference in the Falklands, certainly, but that was over twenty years ago - and if we are going back decades it seems rather to have been cancelled out by Eisenhower's folly at Suez in trying to curry favour with the Arabs by opposing Britain, France and Israel - a ploy that failed miserably.

If the IRA starts up again in a few years time, will the US help us exterminate terrorism in Ulster the way we helped them in Afghanistan? They'll do their bit with regards intelligence, certainly, and it would be unfair to expect America to fight a threat to Britain alone the way Britain treated a threat to all of Western civilisation. So perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect such help. But that still leaves unanswered the question of what we get out of it. I certainly support the United States and the Bush Administration, but active support is another matter altogether. I think if Britain is to engage in active support for the US, it is right to expect some active support in return. Yesterday's revelations shook my confidence that we do receive such a thing. If they are a freak occurrence, they can be forgotten at once. But if, as is possible, they represent a more general trend, some serious questions need to be re-examined.