Andrew Roberts: Britain Goes Wobbly on Terror

Mr. Roberts's The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, will be published next Monday by HarperCollins.

I never thought I'd say this, especially less than a fortnight after the Royal Wedding, but my countrymen's reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden have made me doubt my pride in being British.

The foul outpouring of sneering anti-Americanism, legalistic quibbling, and concern for the supposed human rights of our modern Hitler have left me squirming in embarrassment and apology before my American friends. Yet what I most despise my fellow Britons for is their absolute refusal, publicly or even privately, to celebrate the most longed-for news in a decade.

This was a military operation in a long war against an enemy commander whose courier started the shooting in a compound that, for all the Navy SEALs knew, might well have been booby-trapped. The most famous video clip of that commander is of him firing an automatic weapon.

The idea that bin Laden was retreating to his bedroom in order to give himself up and ask the details of his Miranda rights is risible. Yet Britons utterly refuse to obey the natural instincts of the free-born to celebrate the death of a tyrant...