My childish view of a nasty America is still popular

By Charles Moore writing in The Telegraph

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This picture of the United States was not all wrong, but it was notable for what it missed out. I learnt very little about the vigour of the freedom provided for under the American Constitution, the country's encouragement of large-scale immigration, its rising living standards. I did not know how well America had reconstructed Germany, Japan and the economies of western Europe after the war.

The BBC did not preach to me about the Soviet threat with the same ardour that it preached about racial prejudice. I therefore thought that America was very violent and very backward, and I could never quite understand why such a country was by far the most powerful in the world. If I asked people why, they would say, "Oh well, it's because it's so rich," as if wealth were something that simply descended upon you without the contribution of human effort. As a result, I understood very little about America.

Today, we are presented with a similar narrative - so powerful that I find that 90 per cent of people here believe it, even those who think of themselves as conservative. The narrative is that America is bullying and naive about the outside world. It is very keen on killing people. George W Bush is taken to embody these characteristics, since he wears cowboy boots and is inarticulate and prays a lot. (Fine for Muslims to pray, not for Christians.)

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Suppose that the reports accusing UN officials of corruption in the oil-for-food programme had been made against America. Suppose that it was Halliburton, the company for whom Vice-President Dick Cheney once worked, which had taken 10 per cent off the oil-for-food contracts. Suppose that America were accused of the sort of behaviour that has been alleged, on the basis of Iraqi official documents, against France and Russia. I think we would have heard of little else. As it is, though, the oil-for-food story has somehow drifted away in a muddle about who's going to run the next bit of the investigation.

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So what is actually happening while we, the British public, follow the narrative, half-bored, half-horrified, desperately wanting to be told that something good will turn up? I think the answer is that the people who have long made it their business to run these things, reassert control. Their universal doctrine is that the nasty people - Mugabe, Brezhnev, Milosevic, Arafat, once upon a time, Saddam himself - are the ones to prop up in the interests of "stability".

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As King Abdullah of Jordan - a "moderate", but also someone whose country was economically dependent on Saddam - recently put it, Iraq should be ruled by "somebody with a military background who has experience of being a tough guy". Remind you of anyone?