America and Europe - A relationship that’s worth rebuilding

WHEN US President George W Bush visited Ireland for the first time — four years ago this month — it was a significant event and was marked accordingly.

President Bush was here to attend an EU-US summit. Old friends, meeting in a beautiful place, to discuss common interests. The placards were out and the gardaí, as ever, manned the cordons. Water canons were on hand though they were not needed.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern raised suspicions that US flights using Shannon facilitated the torture of prisoners. He, and President McAleese, raised concerns about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

The American president offered calming reassurances and said he was “sick” when he learned of what had happened in Abu Ghraib prison.

He did not mention Guantanamo Bay which still operates outside all accepted norms of justice. On the day we voted to reject the Lisbon treaty the American Supreme Court delivered another setback to President Bush’s “war on terrorism”. By a 5-4 vote, the court struck down the law he pushed through a Republican-led Congress in 2006 that took away the habeas corpus rights of the prisoners to seek full judicial review of their detention.

“We’ll abide by the court’s decision ... we’ll study this opinion and we’ll do so ... to determine whether or not additional legislation might be appropriate,” he said in Rome. Just like so many of Europe’s leaders President Bush seems to consider such rulings inconvenient finger-wagging rather than decisions that must be observed in spirit and practice.

To rub salt into the wound President Bush gave the keynote speech of his farewell tour — he leaves the White House in six months — in Paris on liberty.

Responding to Mr Ahern in 2004 he said: “The action of those troops (in Abu Ghraib) did not reflect what we think. And it did harm. It did harm because people in Ireland and elsewhere said ‘this isn’t the America we know, the America we believed exists.’”

Yesterday, as President Bush visited Belfast, that 2004 reaction could be seen as an apt assessment of his presidency. More than any other president since World War II, when America saved Europe and established the Marshall Plan recognising that prosperity is the great unifying force, President Bush has driven a wedge into a relationship that should be all but indestructible.

America is not admired as it once was and it is feared by some of those whose parents were inspired by the superpower’s ambition, by the opportunities it offered to the “huddled masses”.

The superpower’s intransigence towards efforts to confront climate change are particularly dispiriting.

Some Americans are not that bothered about the changing dynamic. The secretive, uncompromising, black-or-white neo cons who have had so much sway in the last seven and a half years, seem almost relieved that the obligations of friendship have been eased.

Europe would like to think that not all Americans are as indifferent to the relationship that has served us all so well and will hope that either President McCain or President Obama will consider it worthwhile to rebuild it. Like all worthwhile relationships it should be able to withstand a temporary little difficulty.