The neighbors to the north are reported very, very angry with the United States over the recent tragedy in Afghanistan, where soldiers of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry were caught in accidental F-16 fire -- "friendly fire" with decidedly unfriendly consequences. Four Canucks were killed and eight others wounded.

In a page one article, the nationally-circulated newspaper The Globe and Mail reported Friday that "across the country and around the world," Canadians were enraged and many "were quick to see it as an example of the US military's indifference to foreign troops." (Hey, low blow, guys: Canadian troops who stood shoulder to shoulder with GIs in the big wars prrobably wouldn't buy that line. Nor might they join those carping Canadians who questioned the overall competence of American soldiers.)

Major General Lewis Mackenzie, who retired from the Canadian army after serving -- not without controversy -- as commander of the United Nations peacekeepers in the Balkans, is not one of the crowd rushing to judgment over one bad call in Afghanistan. Referring to the liaison system between ground and air forces, he told The Globe and Mail, "Nobody does this better than the Americans."

First reports from the field said the American pilot thought he was fired on from the ground. The Princess Pat's soldiers were unaware of any such hostile act, the reports said.

General Ray Henault, Canada's chief of defense staff, was restrained, saying the tragic accident was a mystery.

Canadians as a people are widely admired. Most everybody agrees that they are wonderful, exceptionally decent people. For its part, the UN has reason to be grateful to them for always standing fair and square with the Organization when their help was needed; for instance, for every peacekeeping operation the UN ever mounted. But they do seem to have lost their cool over this unhappy incident, judging from the media reactions and the radio call-in shows. These are as wild in Canada as they are in the US.

They even jumped all over nice President George W. Bush, complaining that he should not have limited official US condolences to a message to Prime Minister Jean Chretien, but ought to have addressed the Canadian people.

Alas, feelings of resentment toward the US are nothing new. They are often voiced around the UN where diplomats are not always diplomatic, and they do like to chatter. But this is only anecdotal and, in all fairness, a scientific poll still might find that pros and antis were about equal.

Salman Rushdie, who has been overly shrill in some of his pronouncements, wrote in the liberal English daily The Guardian not long ago that the success of the US campaign in Afghanistan "may paradoxically have made the world hate America more than it did before." In his op-ed article, titled "Anti-Americanism has taken the world by storm," Rushdie said visitors to Britain and continental Europe in the five months after Sept. 11 "will have been struck, even shocked, by the depth of anti-American feeling among large segments of the population, as well as the news media."

Ah, the news media! In a nation justly famous for its eccentrics and outright loonies, those friendly British editors are forever on the lookout for aberrant behavior in America that, at home, might be considered no more than mildly amusing or even fairly normal.

After the war in Afghanistan produced mixed reactions, ranging from mild approval in Europe to outright condemnation in the Arab street, and elsewhere in the developing world, the critics now have something else to complain of: US support for Israel and alleged American indifference to the wretched plight of the Palestinians.

The Pew polls, which have an excellent record of reliability, recently found that notwithstanding Secretary of State Colin Powell's recent noble effort at peacemaking, substantial majorities in France, Germany, Italy and the UK still thought the US was not doing as much as it could to broker a settlement. (After the European Union's pathetic attempts at intervention, this criticism is pretty rich.)

Not surprisingly, sympathies remained heavily with the Palestinians in all of the countries that Pew polled.

On the plus side for the US, the Europeans gave a thumbs up to the military campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda. In Britain, an impressive 77 percent said the US reaction to terrorism was the right one. The British may have a slightly different take from the others, of course, having experienced terrorism at first hand in London and elsewhere for several years; Earl Mountbatten, the Queen's uncle, was killed in one attack and Margaret Thatcher narrowly escaped injury or death in another.

Saddam Hussein may draw comfort from the Europeans' response to proposals to take the next anti-terrorism step inside Iraq. Three-fifths of Germans and Italians responding opposed the idea. However, there was a marked shift, Pew found, when the issue was raised of Iraq's being proved to have nuclear weapon potential.