TO ITS CRITICS America has always been a scarily cavalier country, always spoiling for a fight, trigger-happy, cocksure, ready to blunder in to some hapless far-off country in a blaze of Howitzers and Old Glory. “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,” sing the Marines, their jaunty verses extending America’s messy imperium further and further around the globe. From the snows of the Hindu Kush to the dusty streets of Baghdad, they might add now.

Europeans visiting America are instantly struck by the reverence with which Americans treat their military. Buzzcuts are as familiar a sight on US streets as pony tails on European boulevards. The nation’s great military memorials are not, as in Europe, principally reminders of the pity of war, but celebrations too, of the glories of human sacrifice in a noble cause.

When George Bush said in his prime-time address to the nation this week, in front of an audience of red- bereted soldiers, “There is no higher calling than service in our armed forces”, it struck many Europeans as confirmation of America’s distasteful inversion of priorities. No higher calling? What about nurses and doctors? But for Americans it was an affirmation of the simple truth that to fight and if necessary, to die for one’s country is the noblest vocation imaginable.

But the critics, in their eagerness to denigrate the country they regard as irredeemably simplistic, miss its complexity. There is another history of American military intervention which points to rather different conclusions.

Americans have proved to be extremely reluctant warriors. They do indeed, honour, quite properly, the sacrifices made by The Greatest Generation in the Second World War. But they were highly reluctant, too reluctant in fact, to make that sacrifice. In 1940 Congress, faithfully reflecting the views of the people, did its utmost to avoid taking the US into a foreign conflict. There are still those around today who believe FDR contrived to lose a couple of thousand men and 20 warships at Pearl Harbor so he could better persuade Americans to fight.

Vietnam began slowly, presidents treading carefully, insisting the buildup would not lead to a full-blown military commitment. It ended by reinforcing most Americans’ suspicions of wars fought in distant nations.

In the 1980s martial Cold War rhetoric was matched on the ground with swift military retreat from the Middle East after relatively minor setbacks there. The 1990s were a decade when Americans’ understandable suspicion of military entanglement turned almost into an allergy to war-fighting.

Success in Kuwait in 1991 — a war about which many American felt profoundly ambivalent until it was almost over — actually seemed to have the perverse effect of reinforcing US scepticism. After the humiliation of Somalia, President Clinton never dared put American troops in harm’s way.

In fact while today’s armchair critics in Europe see America as a bloodthirsty warrior, its enemies have always seen precisely the opposite. Hitler thought Americans’ Aryan purity had been fatally weakened by immigration and ethnic diversity. The Russians thought years of capitalist decadence had sapped its resolve. Whatever else bin Laden and Saddam Hussein may or may not have had in common, they both believed Americans were essentially soft, would not have the stomach for a fight once engaged. Hit them hard and they may lash out at first, but they will bend and retreat at the first sign of a serious struggle — as they did in Beirut and Mogadishu.

To European critics the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was irrefutable proof of America’s irredeemable bloodlust. Two years later, however, it is the enemies’ proposition that is being tested. The background to President’s Bush’s speech this week was growing discontent with the progress in Iraq, a discontent that is beginning to manifest itself in calls from some domestic quarters for the US to pull out.

As it happens, both the critics and the enemies are wrong, or at best, half-right. Americans are more likely to see the use of force as a productive means of achieving foreign policy ends. But they are not trigger happy or warmongering; and their support for a war is not immutable.

History suggests that for the American public to continue its support for a protracted struggle, three conditions must be met. They must be convinced that their cause is a noble one. No country in the world is as animated by ideals as Americans. But idealism alone will not suffice. Even Americans won’t in the end fight for abstract principles, or for somebody else’s freedom.

The second condition is that a war must be seen as being conducted against a threat, immediate or emergent, against Americans.

Thirdly, Americans will back a lengthy war only if they believe their leaders have a clear strategy for winning. In the end it was not lack of faith in the cause in Vietnam that undermined support for the war among a majority of the US population. It was a steadily strengthening conviction that their leaders had given up believing the war could be won.

Iraq today still meets criteria one and two. It remains a noble cause, in keeping with the highest American ideals — liberation of a people from a hideous tyranny. And it is a fight in defence of America’s interests. Establishing a democratic base in the Middle East remains the key to overturning the ideologies of fundamentalist hate that are the root causes of terrorism.

It is fulfilling the third condition that may be hardest now. Americans wonder increasingly whether their political leadership has a clear idea of where the struggle in Iraq is headed. At times they wonder whether their leadership actually knows or understands what is going on. No one can set out a detailed path to victory against an insurgent enemy. But the Bush Administration needs to demonstrate a commitment to getting the job done. That means not only protestations of resolve, but actions to back it up; specifically more troops if needed. Otherwise the steady attrition of support will gather ominous momentum.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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