Nobody wants to attack us, just as nobody wanted to see our PM in Saudi Arabia. We should stop thinking that our role is so important, advises Andrew Stephen

In hundreds of journeys between the US and Britain, I have rarely - if ever - felt culture shock when I arrived back in either country. Leaving London for Peshawar en route to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, yes. Flying into Jeddah and Dhahran as Iraq was preparing to send Scud missiles hurtling towards Saudi Arabia, yes. Into Egypt, Oman, yes, at least a little. But when I flew in to London for a couple of days this month, I felt genuinely bemused, finding that I had arrived in a country suffering from some kind of bipolar war psychosis: half the country was having intelligent debates about the consequences of unleashing fearsome weaponry on Afghanistan, while the other half of the UK seemed to be wallowing in some absurd misapprehension that it is a country in the middle of a war.

Having spoken to Jimmy Young on BBC Radio 2 just the previous day about how anthrax had spread at the office building of a tabloid in Florida, I arrived at Heathrow to find the British tabloids ranting about the evil new threat of anthrax - not in the US, but in Britain itself. I switched on the television to see London firefighters going through "emergency" drills for which, dressed like astronauts, they were being scrubbed down. Why, I wonder, does Britain feel so compelled to delude itself that it must be at the heart of a worldwide conflict? When President Bush meets Chancellor Schroder in Washington and says that America has no greater friend than . . . wait for it . . . Germany, why is this hardly reported in the UK? Is Britain collectively envious of American power? Does it want slavishly to ingratiate itself with the biggest kid on the block, to subordinate itself?

I reported last week how, of the 60 strike aircraft used in the first two nights of the joint "US-UK" bombing operation, precisely none was British. Just one symbolic British submarine, in fact, now appears to have been used. But the facts couldn't stand in the way of a good story: this was an operation, after all, in which America and Britain, true to the finest traditions of celluloid wartime romance, were supposed to be standing "shoulder to shoulder". So the logic seems to be that there is a licence to stretch and invent facts in order to facilitate this cosy closeness. For example, the government itself wildly distorted the number of British feared dead on 11 September: both Tony Blair and Jack Straw gave the House of Commons seriously misleading estimates of how many Britons were killed. Straw said later: "The total number of confirmed British deaths is unlikely to be less than the middle hundreds and may be higher." Well, Britain's Ruritanian Foreign Office was way off: the final tally is now thought to be below even 100.

But that did not stop the embarrassing absurdity of Prince Andrew turning up in New York on 15 October to award an honorary knighthood to Mayor Giuliani. ("A pitiful spectacle - that prince of yours," said a senior Republican friend of mine of the kind who would have been quite happy to burst into tears had she found it genuinely moving.) The first man to die of anthrax in Florida, 63-year-old Bob Stevens, is still widely described in the UK as "British", but was actually a US citizen who had lived here for 30 years. It seemed almost as though Britain was desperately looking for every possible way it could find to link itself with the terrible events of 11 September - even down (and this is where it all becomes distinctly uncomfortable) to wanting furiously to see itself as a target.

"Tony Blair has beaten Washington a second time . . ." began a report by the Times foreign editor. In whose eyes? Those of London's introverted, self-important chattering classes? The UK's population of 60 million? America's 285 million? Or the world's 6.18 billion souls? Blair's trip to Oman (a nonsense in itself - does anybody doubt that Oman is anything more than a controllable, pliable military base for the west?) was assumed in Britain to be crucial, just as the refusal of Saudi Arabia to see him was reported in the UK as a desperate blow to peace hopes. I didn't see it reported that Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, had already been to Saudi Arabia and squared with the sheiks there, making their "snub" of Blair quite inconsequential.

What remains to be seen, alas, is whether Blair's ludicrous, 27,000-mile journeys and his constant over-the-top support for America will result in some kind of odd wish-fulfilment: that, just because Britain has perfected the role of appearing to be heavily involved, so reprisals that would not otherwise have materialised will, in fact, now hit the UK. If so, I fear Tony Blair will have this on his conscience for the rest of his life. He may have been whipping up the publicity for himself in Britain, but how many know that Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, to take just one example, has quietly been to Jordan to hold talks with King Abdullah II?

The other part of the culture shock reflected much better on Britain, however. For all its delusions of imperial power, Britain was at least aware of an angry, baying Islamic world in revolt out there: it was possible to see Jeremy Paxman mediating between Ronald Reagan's infamous "Prince of Darkness", Richard Perle, and two articulate Muslims with different points of view, a debate that is unthinkable here.

Back in Washington, I was told that Senator Dianne Feinstein ordered gas masks for her office on the day that anthrax powder was found to have been sent to Senator Tom Daschle's office. The same friend who had been repelled by the sight of Prince Andrew with Rudy Giuliani had just been to her doctor, who told her that patients were asking for anthrax tests at the rate of approximately 30 an hour. By mid-afternoon last Tuesday, the FBI had received 2,300 possible anthrax reports, and was expecting many, many more.

But although the whisperings about George W Bush's competence are no less intense, his 20 September proclamation - "either you are with us or you are with the terrorists" - still holds firm domestically, with any breath of criticism of US policy deemed un-American. The obvious rejoinder to Bush's pronouncement is that it is a perfectly honourable position for the most patriotic of Americans (and Britons, for that matter) to: a) find the 11 September atrocities repugnant; b) want to pursue those who committed them with the utmost zeal; but c) have little confidence that the troika of Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld has the right answers. And if Americans themselves dare to question the wisdom of their leaders sotte voce, it should not surprise them that Saudi Arabia's "interior minister", Prince Nayef, says he "opposes terrorism but does not approve of the US response."

Inside the US, holding that view is still tantamount to treason, but the understanding that there is a vast, angry Islamic world out there is just beginning to dawn on Americans. The National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, gave an interview last Monday on the Qatar-based al-Jazeera television network to try to push the view that "our war on terrorism is not a war against Islam". But on the whole, America still manifoldly trusts in its own righteousness. The reality is that, in the past decade, US overseas development funding has plunged, but a characteristically ill-informed leader in the Washington Post harrumphed last Tuesday: "Since the end of the cold war, the United States has spent a decade promoting democratisation, human rights and economic development; if it is now thanked with blind hatred, it may doubt whether to go on." It is just that kind of ignorant isolationism that is so alarming to friends of America here.

Diplomatically, Colin Powell was trudging across the subcontinent last week, frantically trying to put the pieces together in what is a very American foreign-policy fashion: get that Pakistani guy, General Pervez Musharraf, on board, and we'll build US foreign policy out of people and entire countries that the US was spurning just weeks ago. It is a peculiar inversion of American "values", the word we now never stop hearing: cajole, push, prod, bribe the likes of Musharraf into acquiescence, and screw what any of Pakistan's 138 million people think. It is in itself an imperialistic and undemocratic approach to foreign affairs - but it is not an approach that troubles consciences here.

Hallowe'en pumpkins have already started appearing on doorsteps in Washington, inevitably painted in red, white and blue stripes; a supplier of Hallowe'en costumes reports that customers "don't want the gory stuff, the Grim Reaper of Death usual sort of stuff". And while we may all be weeping for Rupert Murdoch (he laments that his News Corp media empire will probably lose $100m as a direct result of last month's hijackings), we can feel happier for the owners of the mercenaries' Soldier of Fortune magazine, which reports a 25 per cent rise in subscriptions since 11 September.

America's blood is up, and a lot more bullets will go flying yet.

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