ABSTRACT
At the beginning of May 2004 President George W. Bush responded to the reports of widespread ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison by American service personnel with the plea that Iraq ‘must understand that what took place does not represent the America I know’. Mrs Laura Bush rallied to her husband's assistance with the claim ‘that's not the picture of America’. Indeed she claimed that reports of abuse of prisoners were quite untypical of American military conduct. ‘That's not the story of most of the troops who are in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it's certainly not the story of our country.’ It is not the aim of this essay to suggest that the widely publicised (mainly because it was so copiously photographed) humiliation of Iraqi prisoners is somehow the ‘real America’. The incident serves to illustrate a divergence between the view that a country might take of its conduct, and the way that its policies, especially in wartime, might be interpreted by the less-than-sympathetic citizens of other countries. At the Republican national convention in September of that year, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made the case for the ‘greatness of America’. He stressed that ‘we are the America that fights not for imperialism, but for human rights and democracy’. Schwarzenegger put the best possible gloss on American behaviour in war; the terrorists’ ‘hate’, he proclaimed, ‘is no match for America's decency’.
