A hundred years ago, an outcry broke out in the United States over atrocities committed by the Marine Corps during the "pacification" of the Philippines. Newspapers carried accounts of massacres. Senate hearings were told of torture. A commander was forced to retire after admitting he ordered the execution of 11 civilians on the island of Samar.

That episode ushered in a century in which Americans applied intense scrutiny to their armed forces, their commanders and political masters. The century included Hiroshima, My Lai and the Pentagon Papers. It ended with confirmation of the slaughter by U.S. troops of hundreds of civilians during the Korean War, at the hamlet of No Gun Ri.

Nothing is more American than questioning the actions of military and political leaders. Some of the most eloquent critics of America's global pretensions are to be found in the United States itself.

Yet in Canada, a vocal minority would have you believe it is the soul of anti-Americanism to question the Bush administration's motives in pursuing war against Iraq, its conduct of the battle against Osama bin Laden, or its attack on civil liberties at home.

Maybe I don't get out enough, but I don't hear Canadians going on about what evil people Americans are. Never have, really, least of all in the past year or so. What I do hear, and what opinion polls tend to confirm, is a high degree of skepticism about the course being charted in Washington for the United States -- and for the rest of us.

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of Canadians as well as Americans is utterly convinced of the need to smash the al-Qaeda terror network. Partly for that reason, many of us -- on both sides of the border -- are not persuaded that it's wise to unleash a war against Iraq. We also wonder about a "national security strategy" that aims at absolute U.S. military dominance until the end of time.

Yet somehow, in some quarters, these reasonable, sincerely held doubts are perceived as visceral antipathy toward the United States itself.

Here's Lysiane Gagnon, writing in these pages last month: "In Canada . . . a large part of the elite is more anti-American than ever." A few days later, Canadian Alliance Leader Stephen Harper was on about the "deep anti-Americanism" of the Chrétien government.

Not long ago the Ottawa-based Conference of Defence Associations, which argues for higher defence spending, circulated a rant from Britain's Daily Mirror. It was headlined Shame on You American-Hating Liberals. "America [post Sept. 11] could have turned a large chunk of the world into a parking lot," the article says. "That it didn't is a sign of strength." The CDA called this rubbish "well worth reading."

Anti-anti-Americanism reached double-digit volume last week in a froth-flecked editorial from the CanWest Global newspaper chain. It ran on the front pages of daily newspapers in Ottawa, Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Regina, Saskatoon and Windsor, as well as the National Post. It sought to blame all of Canada for Françoise Ducros's "moron" comment about George W. Bush.

"Responsibility for the intellectual climate that encouraged [Ms. Ducros's remark] is widely shared," the diatribe began. "This country's public culture and political history are steeped in cheap and wrong-headed anti-American sentiment . . ."

It ended with what sounded like a call to revolution, drawn straight from the U.S. Declaration of Independence. If the "attitudes" of the federal government threaten our ties with the United States, CanWest said, "it is the duty of the people to alter or abolish such government."

This is just wrong. We cannot countenance global bullying, or sign on to every mad adventure dreamed up in the bunkers of Virginia, in the pathetic hope of getting a break on softwood-lumber exports.

We know that when U.S. governments seek to arbitrate global morality, they often get it wrong. (Saddam Hussein, circa 1982.) We're within our rights to be alarmed at plans for giant computer systems to snoop through our travel and credit-card records. What on Earth is anti-American about that?

We celebrate the best of America's history and culture. We thank Americans for their vast contributions to the cause of freedom and humanity. We will go to our graves haunted by Sept. 11, 2001, and determined to help prevent a repeat.

And as we've done so many times before, we watch in sorrow as misguided rulers in Washington undermine what is great about America. Thankfully, in the past, this has been corrected in due course by Americans themselves.
pknox@globeandmail.ca