Blair and Bush: The special relationship - 12 October 2001

There was a time, any time before 11 September this year, when every week I sat down and said to myself: Now, what shall it be? - and then said whatever came to mind.

Not anymore. Something has come to mind and I should love not to have to talk about it. But since it's a theme, a topic, that is more than less obsessing the country it would irresponsible to let it ride. Very well then.

"Anthrax, from Greek for a burning, hence it got attached to particular burning conditions in humans and came to mean an ulcer, a carbuncle.

"An infectious disease of wild and domesticated animals, especially cattle and sheep, which is caused by a bacillus and can be transmitted to man but is not contagious between humans." - Webster.

I don't suppose many Americans who are not farmers, anyway, have looked the word up in their dictionaries since 1976 which was the last time it had been reported in a human in this country.

There have been only 18 human cases in the United States in the past century.

So why should the death of a 63-year-old man in Florida last week touch off a wave of anxiety, bordering on hysteria, in the state of Florida, if not in the nation?

Because ever since 11 September the government, the attorney general in particular, has been warning people that the best known terrorist organisations, including Bin Laden's, have access to, if they don't actually run, laboratories for the manufacture of biochemical weapons.

And consequently the Department of Justice is putting us on the alert.

I wonder if this was wise. This alert is a rather vague order to obey.

It reminds of some signs they used to post on the highway running alongside La Guardia airport. They said: "Warning: Low flying planes".

The only thing you could think to do was to duck whenever you saw a plane but in doing so you might well not attend too closely to the steering wheel.

There were several accidents to citizens obediently paying attention to the warning signs, and they were taken down.

Just when viewers had seen Attorney General Ashcroft's warning against biochemical poisons and a possible attack the former governor of Wisconsin, one Tommy Thompson, in his new post as Secretary of Health and Human Services, gave a gung-ho, reassuring, "all is fine" address to the nation, saying the United States had on hand plenty of vaccines to take care of any biochemical attack that might happen.

What a relief to know that the United States is able to treat 280 million people over a continent 3,000 miles wide and 2,000 long for a whole range of poisons - a dozen or more - that can be carried in a wallet, sprinkled as dust in an envelope, sprayed into a ventilation system and spread in other simple ways.

A few seconds' thought made this sound like a wild statement, ill conceived as a reassuring one, for which, whether or not he was the originator, President Bush must take the blame.

The effect of Governor Thompson's cheery talk was to goad people into thinking about a situation they can't possibly control.

Governor Thompson's intent was fair enough - a 63-year-old photographer in Florida has been diagnosed with anthrax and last week he died.

The publicising of his death made people, in and out of Florida, apprehensive, if not scared, of a disease they had probably never thought about in their lives.

But worse: Two more people who worked in the same company had been diagnosed with anthrax.

Now in spite of the insistent assurance that anthrax is not contagious between humans - it exists in soil and dust - the anthrax panic of Florida has crossed the continent to Los Angeles where there are innumerable stories of people buying up gas masks, all the antibiotics in sight, just in case.

Purchasing yards and yards of plastic stripping to seal their doors and windows against the dispersal fumes of some deadly chemical.

And, as Los Angelinos did most notoriously once the Russians had the bomb, they've started filling basements and garages with canned and powered food, bottled waters and other conveniences which promises or hope that you will survive for, say, two weeks.

It's been calculated that the odds against any one picked person being the victim of the next terrorist attack are about 100,000 to one.

Heavier odds favour my being killed next time I go one block and cross 96th Street at Madison Avenue.

And yet a national poll taken only days ago reported that 52% of all Americans think that they and/or their families could be the next victim.

What is there to set against this melancholy figure, this bad news?

Well, to begin with: High technology stocks have gone up to the September 10 mark, not true of any other stocks.

There's an increasing number of Americans who are eating out at nights in restaurants.

The grandest hotels, whose occupancy rate went down within one week to 12%, are moving back into the 50%.

And whereas before the 11th airplanes were 75% fully occupied they were, this week, moving up to 60%.

Travel agents are, however, hanging on by their fingernails.

Slowly but surely we can only hope that people are trying hard to act on the last line of the national anthem and make this the home of the brave.

It doesn't help that FBI warnings of imminent attacks feeds the anxiety of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

By the way whatever happened to the national anthem?

In the dreadful beginning - the times of the rescue heroes, the grieving thousands and the endless funerals - I was surprised and shocked when that assembly of Senators and Congress men and women stood on the steps of the Capitol at a candlelight vigil and sang, not the national anthem at all, but the late Irving Berlin's God Bless America and since then it seems to me it's been sung everywhere - at ball games, at memorials - everywhere you'd expect the national anthem.

The only place I've heard it played, and with a grandeur worthy of its musical period, was by the Coldstream Guards in the grounds of Buckingham Palace.

Is there not some positive memorable good news?

There is. It is the emergence into public view and admiration of a figure undoubtedly recognisable on sight anywhere in Britain but not in the United States until the past week or so. It's the face and figure of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

I'm well aware of some comment in England, both grumbling and facetious, that he thinks of himself as President Blair.

A favourite magazine of mine actually chided him for giving a press conference in the garden of 10 Downing Street - hoping, it suggested, an authoritative parallel with President Bush, or any other president, talking to the press in the Rose Garden of the White House.

I'm glad these comments have not been widely reported in the United States for the point of them would be incomprehensible.

I recall one time, during the Second World War, when an American correspondent in London, after hearing a speech by Mr Churchill, asked him privately why he didn't, like President Roosevelt, hold press conferences. President Roosevelt held two a week throughout his entire 13 years in office.

The prime minister shot back at once: "Young man, I live under a parliamentary system.

"My first duty is to report not to the press but to the common people, through their elected representatives in what we call the House of Commons."

So much for prime ministerial press conferences.

Well I want to say at once that Mr Blair's, I think his three appearances - in Moscow, in Pakistan and most of all his speech in London - moved Americans as much as any words that have come from their own leaders.

Moved them not as set pieces of oratory - President Bush has a very good speech writer who writes graceful, thoughtful, lyrical prose, which does not, however, sound as if it comes from Mr Bush.

On Thursday night though, Mr Bush held an hour's press conference in the White House and surprised his admirers and astonished his early detractors by his knowledge, his grasp of many complexities and the spontaneity of his delivery - a revelation, said the Democratic leader in the Senate.

Now from his first appearance Mr Blair's ideas and beliefs have seemed to come from nowhere but his brain and his heart.

And what has come through is that he believes more frankly and deeply than anybody that the terrorist war is a war against our civilisation.

More than that, Mr Blair's conspicuous presence, especially in Islamabad - where it was thought not a good idea for Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld to appear in public - Mr Blair's presence is a constant and very welcome reminder here that of the 40 nations Mr Bush claims as allies in the cause the United Kingdom is the one that sprang promptly and directly into military assistance.

I have to say that before Mr Blair's remarkable speeches, Washington was already beginning to rustle with a mumbling word or two about the non-appearance of France and Germany and the other Nato allies who were so blessedly quick to invoke Article 5 of the Nato charter.

Secretary Rumsfeld responded to these private doubts by saying that each ally is already doing what it believes it can do best - not necessarily military but intelligence, economic warfare, geopolitical help - all sorts of strange skills, not formerly known much about by any of us before this strange new war.

Well that's a great relief to know.

But it should be said that thanks to Prime Minister Blair, America's general trust in the United Kingdom and admiration for its actions has never been as high since the very dark days of the Battle of Britain.

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