What do they expect?

The death toll and the problems pile up as the occupying force in Iraq makes it clear that America asks questions; the rest of the world just obeys or else. As a preliminary to the publication of a new edition of his biography of Gertrude Bell, 'the Lady' of Iraq, midwife at its birth, founder of the Baghdad Museum, Victor Winstone puts a few questions of his own to the Bush-Blair axis

And now numbers two and three in America's most wanted 'playing card' list gunned down without ceremony, without regard to any of the accepted conventions of war, oblivious of the deaths of bystanders in a bloody assault in Mosul.

The Anglo-American occupying force has descended to the level of the dictators it set out to depose. By its supine deference to a reactionary US administration, Britain has put itself on a par with and Pol Pot, Saddam himself, Mugabe and all the other petty aggressors on the international scene. Look at the discomfiture of ministers as they try to justify their actions before an ever more sceptical public.

Some correspondents of press and the airwaves upheld the best traditions of independent journalism in reporting the illicit war on Iraq. Others were less squeamish. Sent at the pleasure of the Anglo-US military authorities and housed under their aegis, often travelling with the troops they were there to observe, they covered a war that had no international authority and no just cause as if they were its paid agents. Now, like vultures observing the American feast of revenge for 9/11, the same correspondents watch over an occupation that has no discernible end and express surprise when the innocent victims of an illegitimate invasion take up arms and tell the foreign invader to go home.

What do they expect? What do we expect? What would Britons have done if the expected Nazi invasion had happened in 1940? Would we, despite Churchill's promises of fighting in the ditches and hamlets, have simply held out our hands to the men who walked about our country telling us what we could and could not do? Or would we have used those Enfield rifles and broomsticks and knocked off as many invaders as we could, whatever the cost in reprisal and death? Why do we insist that the right of defence which we enjoy becomes terrorism and insubordination when it is exercised by others? Is patriotism now the preserve of Britain and America? Even the most obsequious reporters are beginning to doubt the words and policies of the military commanders they have been ordered to support. Some are openly rebelling against proprietorial edict.

It is of course pointless to ask questions of the USA. America under Bush has taken on the role of the world's supreme bully boy in the absolute conviction that might is right. After the Cold War it has assumed an unassailable position of power over the strong and weak alike so that not even a coalition of powers could clip its wings by the use of military force. It occupies a position unique in history in which it can insult but not be insulted, attack but not be attacked, demand but not be reprimanded. With one small proviso - if other powers can't force it to its knees by conventional means - the determined individual or small group, using the demon weapon of surprise, can. That is why America smarts at the mention of 9/11. That is why its response has been incoherent. It knows that the people who are insulted, attacked, told to do this and do that, have only to bide their time. Sooner or later America will drop its guard. Then it will be punished in a fleeting, unexpected moment of reprisal. America knows it and doesn't like it. It has tasted the revenge of the Middle East for its undisguised support of Israel's arrogant right-wing, and it fears another such attack That is why it has handed over the authority of state to a gang of corporate ruffians who can be trusted to take the world to the abyss rather than make a single concession or relinquish a single source of oil, or allow a challenge however morally justified to Israel's imposture at the heart of the Moslem world. America has a simple choice. It can abandon the men who have made it the most hated power in the modern world, or it can reconcile itself to living in fear for ever and a day§