But we have surely entered some kind of parallel universe when we say, as apparently Labour, Liberal Democrat and Tory MPs did this week, that the request by the US military to deploy some of the British forces towards Baghdad is a cynical attempt to save George Bush’s presidency.

The October Surprise has long been a staple of US presidential elections. The suspicion that unscrupulous incumbent politicians have something up their sleeve ready to deploy just before a tight vote has rattled campaigns many times in the past. In 1968, it was the possibility that a peace deal might be reached to end the Vietnam War. In 1980, it was the prospect of the release of the hostages held at the US Embassy in Tehran.

This time we were all primed for something similar. The capture of some Osama bin Laden lookalike perhaps, from a cave in Afghanistan. The discovery of a couple of milk churns of VX in an old warehouse on the outskirts of Tikrit. A last minute endorsement of John Kerry by Kim Jong Il (in the original Korean, helpfully translated by the White House).

How wrong we were. Instead, we are now asked to believe that the prospect of the deployment of 800 British soldiers to cover, in a corner of Baghdad, for some of the 135,000 US troops needed for the fight in Fallujah will reassure Americans that all is going to be fine in Iraq after all. As The Sun would put it: It’s Our Boys Wot Will Win It — for an otherwise doomed President Bush.

Picture the scene in some family room in Volusia County, Florida. They have just read on page B27 of the local paper an Associated Press brief with the news that plucky Geoff Hoon has ordered the British to save America’s skin.

“Well, that’s it, Hank. Bush has finally managed to persuade the Brits to come and save our asses in Baghdad. Stop your bitching about that job you lost when they shifted the work to that call centre in Bombay. Quit moaning about the budget deficit and 40 million Americans without health insurance. And stop wondering whether that Kerry guy is a pussy when it comes to standing up to terrorists. We’re safe now and I’m going to show my gratitude by voting for President Bush.”

For weeks we have been told that the US would delay an attack on Fallujah because of fears of an electoral backlash at home. Now we are asked to believe that America is going to accelerate it, with the indirect support of the British, in the hope of an electoral bonanza.

I ask, politely: do the people who harbour this sort of fantasy about American politics really believe what they say? Or is it just another excuse to pander to the old notion that Americans are simply too stupid to see through cynical election ploys, however unpersuasive they may be?

I am not sure which is worse, ignorance or condescension, a complete lack of understanding of American politics or a patronising assumption that Americans are so stupid they will swallow anything they are fed.

Both, by the way, are elegantly on display in The Guardian’s brilliantly conceived campaign to get its readers to write letters to the folk of Clark County, Ohio, encouraging them to get out and vote for John Kerry on November 2 in order to save the world from catastrophe. The idea has apparently been eagerly taken up by the paper’s readers. I love the thought of it.

Can you imagine the look on the faces of Mr and Mrs John Doe in Springfield, Ohio, when they get a letter from the typical Guardian reader?

“Hey, Merle, it’s from some nice Englishwoman called Lady Antonia. She says our totally sickening and illegitimate President has butchered millions of innocent people with his illegal campaign of world war and massive tax cuts, while the poor innocents who thrived under the peaceful leadership of Saddam Hussein are being sacrificed on the altar of global capitalism.

“Did you know your old Chevy’s gas tank is literally sucking the blood of millions of defenceless Muslims and choking European children so that Ariel Sharon can re-enact the Holocaust on helpless Palestinians?

“She says that if we don’t vote for John Kerry we’ll be condemning the working people of the world to the Bush-Blair gulag. Jeez, I’d never thought about it like that!”

If anything, by the way, will kill off John Kerry’s campaign as we go down to the wire, I would have thought that this brilliant wheeze will. Memo to Guardian letter-writers: why stop at Ohio? Try Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa.

The irony is that, as ever, the people whose absurd and patronising assumptions underpin these efforts — whether accusing Mr Bush of cynical manipulation of British troops, or urging Americans to set aside their own concerns and listen instead to the consciences of Holland Park on November 2 — are usually the very ones who sneer about how ill-informed Americans are about the rest of the world.

Americans, they believe, are notoriously solipsistic and parochial. They know and care little about the way other societies work; that is why they can be manipulated into voting for a Republican president. That is why they must be educated in the importance of their election to the rest of the world. Fortunately, American voters will ignore all this on election day. They understand what the stakes are.

It is a shame in a way , though, that you cannot imagine American voters writing to the smart people of Hampstead and Islington and urging them to vote a certain way. Imagine what the reaction would be if they did.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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