HOW RIDICULOUS CAN YOU GUYS GET?

Mark Steyn says that the passionate ignorance

of Britain's anti-Americans is giving everyone in the US a good laugh

New Hampshire NOT far from me, in the small Coos County town of Stark, is an old German POW camp. Camp Stark was basically a logging camp with barbed wire. With so many of its men in uniform overseas, the Brown Paper Company agreed to take German prisoners in order to keep its logging operations going. The detainees arrived in the depths of a White Mountains winter and were not impressed by the huts. There were wiremesh screens on the insides of the windows, so that even when you opened them up you couldn't stick your hand out. The Germans pointed out that this was in contravention of the internationally agreed rules on prisoner accommodation, and insisted that the screens be removed immediately.

The camp guards looked at each other, shrugged and said, 'Sure, if that's what you want.' The deep winter snows melted, and eventually it was safe to open the windows. A week later, black fly season arrived — the black fly isn't New Hampshire's state animal but it ought to be — and thousands of the little fellers swarmed in through those big inviting apertures to chow down on all that good Aryan blood. There was a reason for the screens.

I mention this to make two points: 1) there are things that are unforeseen by international conventions; 2) let's talk about the weather. The British, if you'll forgive a gratuitous racist generalisation, seem to be remarkably obtuse about matters meteorological. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of living in a country where it's 54° and overcast all summer and 53' and overcast all winter, and the only divergence from that temperate constancy was missed entirely by Your famous Mr Fish. But at least in the old days Britons were ignorant but fearless: you were the mad dogs and Englishmen out in the midday sun. Now, after four months of cowering at the impending arrival of the entirely mythical 'brutal Afghan winter' — as I write, it's 55° and sunny in Kandahar — Fleet Street's media doom-mongers have moved seamlessly on to the horrors of the brutal Cuban winter: oh, my God, how will these poor al-Oa'eda boys — you know, the ones who could supposedly hole up in the Khyber Pass eating scorpions all winter mak ing a fool of those ignorant Americans — how will these fearsome warriors survive the Caribbean nights and the hordes of malariainfested mosquitoes?

And this time it's not just the usual America-haters at the Guardian and the BBC but the likes of Alice Thomson, Stephen Glover, Alasdair Palmer, Matthew Parris, my most esteemed Telegraph and Speccie colleagues: They are kept in cramped outdoor cages, open to the elements and the attentions of possibly malarial mosquitoes,' notes Mr Glover. 'I mind the shark cages, with their concrete floors open to the elements and the 24-hour halogen floodlights, left near mosquito-infested swamps, so the prisoners can catch malaria when some already have tuberculosis.' frets Miss Thomson.

I don't know whether Alice or Stephen have ever been to Disney World. Doesn't sound like quite their bag, but you never know. Disney World is in the middle of a swamp, and, if you use the employees' exit and turn right rather than left and then on to the dirt track and into the swampy groves, you'll find within minutes the windscreen's full of squished, bloody bugs. Yet when you're on the other side of the fence, waiting in the hot sun for two hours to go on a 60second ride, there are, amazingly, no bugs. Find me a mosquito in Disney World and I'll guarantee you it's an animatronic attraction. A local girl up here ran off to Florida and hooked up with some guy who worked for the Mouse. At their Disney wedding, he told me that, among his responsibilities, he was part of the crew who bombed the perimeter at the crack of dawn each day with industrial-strength bug spray. The same procedure is being carried out at Guantanamo: the camp is sprayed with mosquito repellent.

As for malaria, that seems to have been conjured entirely out of Miss Thomson's head. There is no malaria in Cuba. None. Risk of contracting malaria: zero per cent. And before you Fidel groupies start putting that down to the wonders of the Cuban health system, do you know who eliminated malaria from the island? The United States Army, after the Spanish–American War and by draining swamps and introducing bed-netting and (here they come again) window screens.

So there's no malaria, and a small risk of mosquitoes. As for the 'cramped outdoor cages', they are, in fact, the factory version of Bloody Mary's exotic hut on the tropic isle of Bali Hai in the current West End production of South Pacific. They've got roofs, with eight-foot ceilings — not exactly a Kensington drawing-room, but hardly 'cramped'. As for those concrete floors Alice disdains, all I can say is that a few years back I jacked up my old barn and poured a concrete foundation, and there are truly few more pleasurable sensations on a hot summer's day than putting one's bare feet on cold, shaded concrete. So these `shark cages' have sloped roofs and cool floors. Granted, they have no walls. If they did, they'd be sweatboxes that would likely kill you — unless, of course, you installed air-conditioning, which, as we know, you British types find frightfully vulgar.

Nonetheless, according to an ITN report carried on PBS over here, these poor prisoners will have to 'endure the searing heat'. Actually, these beach huts are perfectly designed for one of the most agreeable cli mates on earth a daytime high in the mid-eighties and an overnight low in the low seventies, with a wafting breeze caressing one's cheek. My advice to Fleet Street is to steer clear of weather for the rest of the war. The merest nudge of the thermostat is enough to send excitable reporters rocketing from one extreme to the other, like the old cartoon of the shower faucet with only the tiniest calibration between 'Scalding' and 'Freezing': Kabul in the sixties is the 'brutal winter', Cuba in the low seventies is the `searing heat'.

So take it from me, Don Rumsfeld's Club Fed huts are cool in the day and balmy at night. They're a lot more comfortable than the windowless 'concrete coffins' of Belmarsh in which your terrorist suspects are banged up 22 hours a day. True, it's a shame they have to have wraparound wire mesh to spoil the view, and there are no banana daiquiris from room service, but the idea is (in case you've forgotten) that they're meant to be prisoners. And, unlike the three-to-acell arrangements in, say, Barlinnie, the Talebannies each have a room of their own, so they won't be taking il up the keister from Butch every night. They get three square meals a day, thrice-daily opportunities for showers, calls to prayer, copies of the Koran, a prayer mat — all part of a regime the Min-or calls a sick attempt to appeal to the worst redneck prejudices'.

It's correct that, for hygiene purposes, they were shaved, which was `culturally inappropriate'. But then, if the US wanted to be culturally appropriate, they'd herd 'em on to a soccer pitch and stone 'em to death as half time entertainment. As to whether or not they are prisoners of war, there is a legitimate difference of opinion on their status: you can't ask them for name, rank and serial number, because the last two they lack and, if Richard Reid is anything to go by, they keep a handy stack of spare monikers. This is new territory. But surely the Fleet Street whingers must know, if only from the testimony of their fellow Britons among the inmates, that there is no 'torture' (the Mail on Sunday), not even by the weather.

Still, my colleagues may be heartened to know that Britain's getting far more attention for its anti-Americanism than it did when it was backing Bush 100 per cent. I drove from New Hampshire to Montreal the other day and, on both Vermont and Quebec radio, I heard references to the 'British-led international protests' against Guantanamo. 'British-led international protests' is a much more convincing formulation than the 'American-led international coalition'. Your side really has got a coalition: Britain, Mary Robinson, the EU, UN, Red Cross. And it's making quite an impression: many people over here had no idea quite how ridiculous you are. You're shocked by us, we're laughing at you.

In fairness, instead of coasting on nonexistent diseases and wild guesses at the weather, the always elegant Matthew Parris at least attempted to expand Guantanamo into a general thesis. 'We seek to project the message that there are rules to which all nations are subject,' he wrote in the Times. 'America has a simpler message: kill Americans, and you're dead meat.'

This caused endless amusement over here. As the Internet wag Steven den Beste commented, 'By George, I think he's got it!'

Mr Parris is right to the extent that there are varying approaches to terrorism. You can take the dead-meat approach, or you can do the British thing: hunker down, fight a defensive war, inconvenience your citizens by shrinking the slots on pillar boxes and eliminating the rubbish bins at railway stations, insulate your political leadership so that the terrorists have nothing to do but blow the legs off grannies and schoolkids, and then after three decades pack it in, give the blood-drenched thugs the red-carpet treatment at the Palace of Westminster, and make them ministers of a Crown they don't even deign to recognise. That playbook wouldn't sell here. If Omagh had happened in, say, Wisconsin, the government would not allow Martin McGuinness to keep his secrets about the perpetrators merely because they had such a high regard for his talents as education minister.

'My difficulty is not with America as America, but with Washington as a hopedfor coalition partner,' Parris continues. 'Partnership in foreign policy is not in their nature.' There's a very good reason for that. Partnership implies the burden is shared more or less equally. If I bought twenty quid's worth of shares in The Spectator and started swanning about bitching that Conrad Black didn't treat me as a partner, he'd rightly think I'd gone nuts. The British in their time were at least as ruthless about such realities as the Americans are today. For example, in September 1944, in one of the lesser-known conferences to prepare for the postwar world, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Quebec City. They had no compunction about excluding from their deliberations the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, even though he was the nominal host. There's a cartoon of the time showing King peering through a keyhole as the bigshots settled the fate of the world without him.

And guess what? Militarily speaking, Canada was a far bigger player back then than Britain is today: the Royal Canadian Navy was the world's third biggest surface fleet, the Canucks got the worst beach at Normandy, but hey, why bore you with details? In those days that still wasn't enough to get you a seat at the table. So what exactly is it that Britain brings to the table today? The RAF did nothing in Afghanistan. The Gurkhas sat out the war in Oman, In the end, the only non-American contribution was a few brave British and Australian SAS men fighting alongside US Special Forces. We honour them for their service and their courage. But they weren't strictly necessary. and in return the Pentagon had to put up with not just that idiot speech from Admiral Boyce but a lot of anonymous MoD pillocks sneering to the Daily Mail about how Washington should let our chaps handle the show because frankly these Yank special forces have always been an absolute shower and should just stay out of the way. Do you realise how pitiful this sounds? The way things are going in the prisoner round-ups, it looks like the major British participation in the war has been on the al-Qa'eda side.

'America has simple gods and likes to keep her Satan simple, too,' declared Matthew Parris. 'In Salem it was once witches. In Senator Joe McCarthy's heyday it was Commies. Now it is al-Qa'eda;

Just for the record, the Salem witch trials were conducted not by citizens of the United States but by British subjects. As for Senator McCarthy's heyday: well, there were a lot of Commies around: in short order, they'd seized half of Europe, neutered much of what was left, and had become the dominant influence on the Third World's political class. Suppose America had followed the rest of the West and elected a détente sophisticate like Helmut Schmidt or Pierre Trudeau, whose first act upon retirement from office was to take his young sons to see Siberia because 'that was where the future was being made' — in 1984! The world would be very different today, and not to my liking. The West won't work if every country's Canada and every leader's Trudeau. The only thing that enables Belgium to be Belgium and Norway to be Norway and Britain to be Britain is the fact that America's America — for all the reasons my Spectator colleagues deplore.