'Whisper of how I'm yearning", sang George M Cohan in one of the great American songs of nostalgia, "to mingle with the old time throng". Well, I'm yearning too, not for the gang at 42nd Street exactly, but for the America that Cohan was indirectly hymning - for the Idea of America, with a capital I, which once made the United States not just the most potent of all the nations but genuinely the most liked. Perhaps, with a future new president already champing at the bit, we are about to witness its rebirth. As a foreigner I am immune to the rivalries or seductions of American party politics, but I have loved the old place for 60 years, and I simply pray for an American leader to give us back its baraka, as the Arabs say - nothing to do with religion or economics or power or even ideology, but the gift of being at once blessed and blessing.

There are many unanswered questions surrounding Britain's increasingly fraught deployment to southern Afghanistan, though none as urgent as this one: why us? The fierce opposition to our military presence in the region - six British soldiers dead in three weeks - was initially described by a Ministry of Defence spokesman as "unexpected". Des Browne, the Secretary of State for Defence, has since admitted that Britain's military presence has "energised the Taliban".