LONDON, 8 July 2006 — Having just returned to America after a year’s absence, I’m pondering this question: Why is it that the United States, which has not suffered a major terrorist attack at home for more than four years, thinks it’s at war, while the United Kingdom, which was hit by a major terrorist attack just a year ago, does not?
The evocation of war is omnipresent in the US. Turn on Fox News and you find a war veteran recounting his experiences on Hill 805 in Vietnam. At one point he says: “I had the privilege of storming the machine gun”. The privilege. Walk into the Stanford University bookstore and you find a special display marked “Salute Our Heroes. 20% Off Select Patriotic Titles”. Imagine that in your local Waterstone’s.
On Tuesday, to mark the 230th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, President George Bush addressed troops at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Insisting that the US would “never accept anything less than complete victory” in Iraq, he informed them “you’re winning this war”.
Telling the story of Capt. Chip Eldridge, who lost part of his left leg in Afghanistan but came back to run a mile in less than seven minutes and jump out of planes, he declared: “The spirit of ‘76 lives on in the courage that you show each day”. On Fox News his speech was followed by comments from the neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol, who observed that you can’t have freedom without fighting for it and that the Declaration of Independence was also a declaration of war.
For the Bush administration and its conservative supporters, there’s no question about it: America is at war. Those are the very words with which President Bush introduced this year’s revised national security strategy: “My Fellow Americans, America is at war.” Everything follows from that. It follows, for example, that the New York Times was “disgraceful” (Bush’s word) to publish details of a secret operation to try to track terrorists’ financial transfers through the Belgian-based Swift clearing system.
“Traditionally in this country in a time of war,” said the then US Treasury Secretary John Snow “members of the press have acknowledged that the commander in chief, in exercise of his powers, sometimes has to do things secretly in order to protect the public.”
Now, one may flatly disagree with the whole analysis. One may regard the statement “you’re winning this war” (in Iraq) as something close to a claim that black is white. One may see the attack on the New York Times as a cynical diversion from the Bush administration’s many problems, not least in Iraq.
But one also has to understand that these statements reflect something real and deep in the conservative part of US political culture. True or false, right or wrong, this is how conservative America has chosen to understand the challenge of Sept. 11, 2001 and to respond to it. At some level, this is where it feels most comfortable: in the simple story of a fight between good guys and bad guys, calling on old-fashioned virtues of courage and honor.
One of the “select patriotic titles” in the Stanford University bookstore is Faith of my Fathers, a gripping memoir by John McCain, the current front-runner to be Republican presidential candidate in 2008.
It recounts the stories of his father and grandfather, both of them admirals, and his own bravely endured imprisonment and torture in Vietnam. On the last page, he recalls his father passing on what he remembered most from his own father’s last message to him: “Son, there is no greater thing than to die for the principles — for the country and the principles that you believe in.”
That, says McCain, is the faith of his fathers that he had tried to live by, “and when I needed it most, I had found my freedom abiding in it.” This is a heroic conception of warrior honor which one could have encountered in most European countries before 1914, but which has been little heard in any mainstream European discourse since 1945.
When I wrote a few weeks ago about the conundrum of suicide-bombers, the eminent military historian Michael Howard dropped me a line to remind me that European soldiers had been sent into battle in the First World War with the message that there was no higher honor than to die for your country. Not to live, to fight, to kill for your country — to die for it. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
In this respect, conservative Americans are closer to the mental world of pre-1914 Europeans or ancient Romans than they are to that of most contemporary Europeans
Liberal Americans are a different matter. Instead of the war on terror, they prefer to talk of Bush’s “war on the media”. In their approach, they are probably closer to most Europeans and, indeed, to most Brits — the most warlike of Europeans and progenitors of the language used by Bush and McCain. Many of Tony Blair’s current problems flow from the fact that, almost alone in Britain, he bought in to the Bush administration’s war rhetoric after Sept. 11, 2001.
Even British Conservatives have not joined him. Can you see David Cameron evoking, McCain-like, the glory and honor of dying for one’s country? Easier to imagine a pussycat roaring like a lion. To note the different reaction of most Brits to the threat of terrorism is to measure the exceptionalism of conservative America today.
On the first anniversary of the July 7, 2005 bombings in London, the truth is that the United Kingdom is at least as likely as the United States to be the target of another major terrorist attack. Perhaps it is even more likely, given the alienation of parts of Britain’s Muslim community — an alienation exacerbated, though not caused, by the war in Iraq and the failure to resolve the Palestinian issue.
Lord Carlile, the well-informed scrutineer of the government’s anti-terrorism legislation, says there is “a real and present threat of further terrorism acts in this country” especially because it is “extremely difficult to find self-starting jihadists in the indigenous population of the UK”. Yet that real threat does not make British politicians and commentators — with the partial exception of our outgoing prime minister — talk of war. We have a different political culture and we choose to see things differently.
Unlike many continental Europeans, most of us do not rule out war as a means of last resort. We think you sometimes have to fight to defend your way of life, but that you should fight clever, keeping a cool head, a strong grasp on reality and a sense of proportion.
We’ve lived with terrorism for years, and we know you can lick it, especially if we don’t overreact and make unnecessary sacrifices of liberty in the name of security — for freedom is its own best defense. Between cheese-eating surrender monkeys and fire-eating war junkies, we look for a middle way. Americans have every cause to be proud on July 4. And on July 7, I’m rather proud to be British.
