President George Bush is ashen-faced with concern. Huddled around him, there are unmistakable tears running down Colin Powell’s cheeks. Vice-President Cheney is clutching his chest as if he might be having a fifth heart attack. The defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld had gone purple with rage, but is now white and out cold. And the reason for this drama? No less a person than Robin Cook – that bearded Scotsman whose very face strikes such fear into the heart of Washington power circles – has criticised US treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo. But wait! Jack Straw is reported as being concerned, too. Eeeks! And the Bishop of Durham! What, and now the Mirror is joining the crusade? Powell is on the floor, weeping hysterically.
Judging from the British media furore (“Stop This Brutality In Our Name, Mister Blair” – Mirror headline), you would think that Britain is an equal (or even senior) partner of the US in the so-called war against terror (“Should Blair Intervene?” – Evening Standard‘s website); that it has a decisive say (or any kind of say at all) in what is going on in either Afghanistan or Guantanamo, and that the Bush administration is terrified of British public opinion. Let me discount that straightaway. There is a universal tendency, I think, for people to assume that other governments and societies act like their own: so, in this case, Britons assume that Americans listen to criticism from overseas, care about it, and react and adjust accordingly.
But that is not the American way. The US is now a country of such unchallengeable power that it can and does create its own moral and humanitarian stances; it does not need to listen to outsiders. It creates its own myths, and then happily lives by them. Its political leaders believe that the domestic audience is all that matters. If America listens to criticism from overseas at all, its collective, reflex reaction is to point out ways in which that criticism is wrong – and how a critic can be put to rights. So some foreign nuts think capital punishment is wrong? They’re just a bunch of wimpy, lefty foreigners who are jealous that they are not Americans and therefore refuse to see things the American way – which, by its very nature, is the right and just way.
I told Sir Jimmy Young on BBC Radio 2 on 18 January that the way prisoners were being treated in Guantanamo could signal the first serious rift between the UK and US over the war against terror. Days later, after much lobby shenanigans involving Jack Straw and No 10, British newspapers started splashing just this story. But then Tony Blair did a Thatcher on his ministers, squashing down his own cabinet. Weeks ago, Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, was publicly humiliated after he said that British troops would not hand over Osama Bin Laden (if they captured him) to the US without an undertaking that Bin Laden would not be executed; Hoon was then repudiated by No 10, which said in effect that Britain would hand over Bin Laden unconditionally, thus breaking EU law. And Jack Straw’s concern that Guantanamo prisoners are not being held under the terms of the Geneva Convention? Phooey, says Blair, putting Straw in his place and so maintaining his one-man role as unconditional cheerleader of the US.
I suspect that Blair has not fully understood what he is getting himself into. The US has always envisioned that the three Britons, an Australian and even the odd Russian or two so far taken to Guantanamo will be returned to face trial in their own countries – a US-imposed policy that brings legal, security and political nightmares to the governments involved. Britain has no convenient colonially acquired overseas port like Guantanamo in which to imprison British nationals – or perhaps the Falkland Islands would do instead? – and there are no obvious offences that the three men (and others to come, apparently) have committed under English law. That, indeed, is the point of the prisoners being taken to Guantanamo: that they are in judicial limbo, at the complete mercy of US military tribunals, and have no recourse to any courts and particularly not to what Rumsfeld disingenuously calls America’s “just criminal system”.
Not that anybody in America questions Rumsfeld’s assertion that they are “unlawful combatants” and therefore not subject to the Geneva Convention. Under the US criteria (no military uniforms or insignias or obvious military structure), members of the Northern Alliance were equally unlawful combatants when they led the way for American attacks on Afghanistan. And what of poor Johnny “Mike” Spann, the CIA man killed in the prison uprising? In a video, he did not appear to be wearing uniform.
The Bush administration, though, could not care less about whether US actions would stand up in an international court. Non-Americans (ie, 95 per cent of the world) do not understand that Americans are actually proud of that picture of the US soldier brandishing the belts and shackles and handcuffs and chains used on prisoners; ordinary domestic criminals, after all, are shackled by their hands and legs, too. Americans can be a bloodthirsty lot: perhaps because they saw so little violence from outside before 11 September, they revel in a vicarious, John Waynesque approach of being “tough” towards their perceived foes. What other national anthem exults in “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air” as the US one does in its fifth line? Americans weep freely when the likes of Ray Charles sing “God Bless America”.
I have been writing about what I described as Rumsfeld’s “callous humour” for months, and it is fascinating to see his cult status now catching on in Britain. “It’s amazing the insight that parliamentarians can gain from 5,000 miles,” he said last Tuesday. “Parliamentarian”, you have to understand, is a dirty word in Rumsfeld’s lexicon: it is a foreign concept and thus un-American. Just how seriously Americans take overseas concern about Guantanamo could be seen last week when Mary Robinson, the UN high commissioner for human rights, appeared on CNN. The caption under her read “British Civil Rights Worker”. Those unreliable Brits again, you see. But rest assured, nobody in the White House is having a heart attack or crying himself to sleep at night worrying what the Brits – or anyone else – think of them or what they’re doing. That’s what being American means in 2002. And don’t forget it, OK?
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