RUTHFULLY YOURS

By ANDREW ROBERTS

I never thought I’d say this, especially less than a fortnight after the Royal Wedding, but my countrymen’s reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden have made me doubt my pride in being British.

The foul outpouring of sneering anti-Americanism, legalistic quibbling, and concern for the supposed human rights of our modern Hitler have left me squirming in embarrassment and apology before my American friends. Yet what I most despise my fellow Britons for is their absolute refusal, publicly or even privately, to celebrate the most longed-for news in a decade.

This was a military operation in a long war against an enemy commander whose courier started the shooting in a compound that, for all the Navy SEALs knew, might well have been booby-trapped. The most famous video clip of that commander is of him firing an automatic weapon.

The idea that bin Laden was retreating to his bedroom in order to give himself up and ask the details of his Miranda rights is risible. Yet Britons utterly refuse to obey the natural instincts of the free-born to celebrate the death of a tyrant.

When the Mets-Phillies baseball game erupted into cheers on hearing the wonderful news, or the crowds chanted “USA! USA!” outside the White House, they were manifesting the finest emotional responses of a great people. By total contrast, when Douglas Murray, the associate director of the Henry Jackson Society, told the BBC’s flagship program “Question Time” last Thursday that he felt “elated” at the news, he was booed, heckled and almost shouted down.

Another panelist, the writer Yasmin Alibhai Brown, was applauded when she said she was “depressed” by the killing, as it “demeans a democracy and a president who has shown himself to be the Ugly American. He’s degraded American democracy, which had already degraded itself through torture and rendition.” The former Liberal Party leader Paddy Ashdown was then cheered when he said: “I cannot rejoice on the killing of any man. I belong to a country that is founded on the principle of exercise of due process of law,” as though the United States was founded on some other idea.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, told reporters: “I think the killing of an unarmed man is always going to leave a very uncomfortable feeling because it doesn’t look as if justice is seen to be done.” Writer Henry Porter whined about “vital moral issues” in the Guardian. Add to that lawyers Geoffrey Robertson in the Daily Beast and Michael Mansfield in the Guardian defending bin Laden’s human rights, and a commentator on the radio station LBC saying that no one should celebrate the death because “we live in a multicultural society,” and you can see how utterly degenerate modern Britain has become when it comes to prosecuting the war against terror.

Of course, all the people so far quoted (except Mr. Murray) come from the salaried commentariat, who might be expected to parrot liberal and establishment pieties. The reason I am so worried is that ordinary people I met in London last week shared their pusillanimity.

There was the lady at a cocktail party who told me “It’s those gun-toting Yanks at it again.” There was my son’s classics teacher informing his young charges that he thought bin Laden deserved the “dignity” of a fair trial. And there was the letter about the U.S. celebrations to the conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph stating that terrorist cells “will be further fuelled by those inappropriate reactions by people who should have known better.” How? How, Ms. Tess Hyland of Bathurst, could al Qaeda possibly hate us more than they do already?

To the man who told me he didn’t believe bin Laden was buried at sea “according to Muslim rites,” I repeat that Mussolini was hung upside down on a meathook and then urinated upon. And as for those people who genuinely thought that the United Nations and Pakistan should have been informed of the raid beforehand, Lord, give me strength!

For the past five years, I’ve been writing a history of the Second World War, and if there is one central lesson I have taken from this study, it is that the intestinal fortitude of a people matters much more than weaponry, economics or even grand strategy. British fortitude was tested almost to breaking point in 1940 and 1941, and Russian fortitude in 1941-43, but they held, whereas Germany’s and Japan’s collapsed in 1945. Morale is almost impossible to quantify, whereas demoralization is all too evident.

From Britain’s pathetic and ignoble reaction to the death of our greatest ally’s No.1 foe, I fear for our fortitude in the continuing war against terror. The British government in London and the British Army in Afghanistan are magnificent, but if the people themselves are shot through with what Winston Churchill called “the long, drawling, dismal tides of drift and surrender,” I wonder whether we can be counted upon for much longer.

As a commentator on the Royal Wedding for NBC, I was filled with pride in my country for the precision-timing and perfect step of the Household Division, the fine behavior of the crowds, and the charm and personability of the young couple. Today all I feel is shame at my country’s pathetic reaction to your own great day of joy.

Mr. Roberts’s “The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War,” will be published next Monday by HarperCollins.

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