High Noon - 1 March 2002

I don't suppose - or perhaps I should put it, I'm sorry to say - that not since the late and regrettable senator Joseph McCarthy has there been a time when the reputation of the United States, in Europe at least, was under such a cloud of distrust and when I say the United States I mean, of course, the government of the United States - the present administration.

Though, I'm afraid, there are many even civilised Europeans who know the method which evaded Edmund Burke, when he - talking of America by the way - said: "I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people."

Before we go into the present discontents I think it only fair to add to my mention of the horrendous Senator McCarthy that years after he was long gone - he died in 1957 - while he darkly discovered Communists in every department of the government, most especially in the State Department, that he never identified one.

And yet, 40 years after his terrifying reign, we had firm evidence from impeccable sources - the Kremlin and the Hungarian archives - that there had been a tight group of dedicated Communists in the State Department. Something unknown either to McCarthy or I imagine to the vast majority of his victims.

His instinct was sound but his detective methods were lamentable.

Well back, as you know doubt expected, to the "axis of evil".

I have to throw off for the moment the reporter's cloak of neutrality and say that when I heard that speech I felt, I thought it was an ideological blunder of the first chop.

Yet another deplorable attempt by the president's speech writer to ape the heroic note of Churchill.

Or - better for his purpose - Ronald Reagan and the moment when he called the Soviet Union "an evil empire" and shouting in Berlin: "Tear down this wall, Mr Gorbachev!"

Those two bugle calls brought forth similar groans, head shakings and tut tuts from all the wisest and most liberal European statesmen.

What did not cross their minds was the thought, which was thunderously echoed by public polls, that for the "evil empire" phrase a wave of relief and admiration for any Western statesman who dared speak so loud, rippled across the Soviets' satellite states.

And that "tear down this wall, Mr Gorbachev!" provoked an astounding Marseilles chorus of deliverance across Eastern Europe.

Indeed Mr Gorbachev himself later confessed that President Reagan's cry did almost as much damage to the Soviet Union as the prime cause of its downfall - the continuous lack, through 70 years, of bread and soap.

But the listening audience for President Bush was very different from the oppressed audience for President Reagan.

The accused villains this time were not part of an empire or an axis - the Soviet Union had no rebellious hysterical religious core, nor do Iran, Iraq and North Korea together. They are, as somebody said, regimes as different from each other as we are from them.

There is, however, one contrary opinion ridiculing the European outrage in a way that - whether or not you find it persuasive - I believe you'll find ingenious and fascinating.

It was written by James Wolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was written for the Wall Street Journal, which has frequently responded to this European choral lament with what, among raucous stage comedians, used to be known as "a raspberry".

We can, for once, accurately revive the tired old word "scenario" for Mr Wolsey does, with cunning simplicity, retell the plot of the famous Gary Cooper epic film High Noon with the United States standing in for the conscience-driven Marshall and his cowardly townsmen on hand as the groaning European nay-sayers.

Here's the way Mr Wolsey sees the very moving and heroic story of High Noon or by implied analogy, George W Bush versus the foreign ministers of Europe. Now here's the story.

The marshall of a small Western town has stepped down. He's cleaned up the town and is leaving it for good with his new bride.

He has taken the reins of the horses when he hears that the gang leader, who had terrorised the place, had been pardoned by the governor and was coming back to resume his tyranny - he was going to arrive on the noon train.

Over the protests of his pretty bride - who Mr Wolsey calls "his pacifist wife" - he changes his mind and starts to organise a posse to protect the town.

The town meeting is at first enthusiastic but as high noon and the desperado approach the marshall's allies hesitate, think again.

"If the marshall's not here there won't be any trouble. What will they (potential investors) think if there's shooting in the streets? Listen I'm not a law man, I just live here. What happens to my young kids?"

They apologise, they shrug their shoulders, they creep off into hiding.

The marshall feels out his pistols, pads along the track as the noon train looms on the horizon.

Half an hour later the leader and his gang lie spattered in the dust and the former allies come out of hiding to swarm around him and salute the winner. The marshall looks at them in disgust, tosses his badge into the dirt and drives away with his frightened wife.

Mr Wolsey ends his recital of the tale with the disturbing note that Fred Zinnemann, the director of High Noon, knew this moral territory well.

As a Jewish refugee from Austria he'd seen all the techniques for rationalising appeasement and had seen also the deadly consequences of not challenging evil regimes before they can wreak total havoc.

Well now - some people will say "clever but preposterous", some "a self righteous defence of America's unilateralism" and some will say - my old friend Fred Zinnemann if he were alive - "an embarrassing grain of truth".

However, underlying all the criticism and the plentiful reporting of it from American correspondents in Europe there is a whacking, false assumption, so unwitting, so taken for granted that I haven't seen any notice of it.

Here are two headlines from two serious papers, not in the habit of topping their sober news with lurid or even dramatic titles.

From the New York Times datelined Brussels: "Europe seethes as the US flies solo in world affairs".

From the Guardian of London, Brussels also Berlin: "Bush's axis of evil widens split with allies".

Now it seems to me that both headlines underline an assumption they don't even know they're making, a double assumption: That the allies means Britain, France, Germany and Brussels and that the United States, not doing much consulting of these defecting allies, is conducting a unilateral war.

I have to say that until last Tuesday I half shared this assumption - that the main allies were in four capitals and even in the one solid supporter, Britain, the foreign secretary had joined the Franco-German-Belgiums at the Wailing Wall.

But then last Tuesday we were present at a revelation - a 20-minute recital by the secretary of defence of who the allies were and what they were doing.

I believe it would have shocked and relieved not only the doubting Europeans but also 99 Americans in a hundred.

At his daily press conference Secretary Rumsfeld was asked, in effect, how he felt about the faltering, the splitting alliance.

Mr Rumsfeld looked at the man with that amused yet friendly tolerance he shows before slightly barmy questioners.

He must have sensed then the going assumption, that I wish he'd spotted three months ago, that I wish the president in his State of the Union address had demolished.

It is this assumption: That if the French and Germans and the easy livers in Brussels deplore American policy the alliance is cracking up.

I have to admit ever since October I've honestly feared that the Nato nations were not living up to their fighting words of 12 September. We've heard so little, if anything, of the Dutch army, the Italians, the Germans and French for that matter.

If asked to say which nations compose the alliance I should have said, like the great mass of Americans, the United States and the UK - and some of the Europeans are helping to trace individual terrorists and bank accounts.

Well did you know the valiant work of the Czechs? That 15% of the Italian navy is fully involved? And how about the Spanish and the New Zealanders?

Secretary Rumsfeld could not publicise the often daring and ingenious roles, non-combatant roles, that many nations were playing because, as he put it, "it could offer new targets to people who wish us ill".

But quite simply and undramatically announced: "There are 36 nations in active alliance."

Those words might be pounded into a yeasty tobacco and put into the pipes of the four or five European foreign secretaries who - as my children used to say to me, or mutter when I got above myself - think they're so great!

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