By Matthew Engel
GuardianFebruary 25, 2003
The caricature of the current state of public opinion is that there are these two polarised continents: Europe, where everyone is against a war on Iraq except Tony Blair and some Spanish bloke with a moustache, and America, where everyone is absolutely gagging for it.
That is worse than an over-simplification. The polls vary, depending on what question is asked and how it is phrased, but on the whole the same lack of enthusiasm for the venture pervades every set of findings, and the difference between one side of the Atlantic and another is not all that marked. And there is an altogether more mysterious phenomenon: it is surprisingly hard, even in the US, to find people who share their leaders' enthusiasm.
I don't just mean that in the usual sense: "Well, all our dinner guests think it's dreadful." On several trips to the American heartland over the past six months, to places such as Indiana, the Dakotas and Wisconsin, I have asked the question as widely as I can, and have found it extremely difficult to find people who support the president on Iraq. Other overseas correspondents report the same phenomenon.
This is not the sort of exercise American pundits go in for much. But Thomas Friedman, the pro-war New York Times columnist, came back from a lecture tour with the same message. Privately, many senators and congressmen have a similar feeling. This has not emboldened the Democrats much in public, and it has certainly not informed the media debate. But it is what's out there.
There is, however, a qualitative difference between US and European opinion and it is nothing to do with the war itself. It is to do with its chief proponent. Politicians often receive more honour and respect far from home than they do from their own electorate: Gorbachev, Giuliani, late Thatcher.
It is hard to think of an elected leader who has reversed this proposition quite so stunningly as George Bush. Last time I was back in the UK, I was struck forcefully by the prevailing contempt, even from the remaining local Conservatives. To an extent, this is a reprise of Ronald Reagan's reputation: he was loathed by the European left, and the right's delight was tempered by patronising amusement. Here he has long since been elevated to secular sainthood, credited with everything short of being able to cure scrofula with a touch. Europeans cannot come to grips with politicians who seem ignorant of the world, and uninterested in it.
It makes Bush's calculated charmlessness towards the world all the more baffling. His diplomatic chat-up line: "Do as you're told or you're irrelevant" is of course novel. It may work in a rough-and-ready way, since the governments represented on the security council will be bribed, blackmailed, browbeaten and bludgeoned into submission over the next fortnight. Their populations will still hate him. An image comes back to me of Jimmy Carter arriving at Newcastle airport while still president and, with three well-coached words of local patois - "Haway the lads" - winning over the entire population. They would have marched on Baghdad right then had he asked. It is impossible to imagine the man whose public visit to Russia comprised a 15-minute walk doing any such thing.
It is different in the midwest, because Bush spends time charming them. When the troops go in, the doubts will probably be swept away with the first dancing Iraqi mobbing the first smiling GI. But the president is asking them to swallow something very alien. The American hinterland was settled by people whose greatest wish was to forget the intrusive politics of the old world and live in quiet prosperity. The political consequences of that forced the US to be late for the last two world wars. Now it seeks to be early for the next. It is not an easy sell.
Americans, unlike Europeans, want to believe Bush knows best, and that their pension plans are being wrecked for a good reason. That stems from the same deference and respect to leaders that makes Britons want to believe that the royal family is not as crazy as it often appears.
But it does go against the grain. A previous Republican president, Calvin Coolidge, once said: "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." It is a time-honoured governmental philosophy, which is why the wars of modern democracy have tended to be those that self-evidently had to be fought. Whether Bush is right or wrong about this one, he has not won the argument in the midwest, any more than he has anywhere else.
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