The Undocumented Mark Steyn (26 page)

Instead, they seem a little touchy about the fact that among the first food supplies to get through was a fresh supply of egg on their faces. When Axworthy and other self-proclaimed “humanitarians” start droning on next month about starving children in Iraq, always remember the lesson of Afghanistan: a bombing pause is not as “humanitarian” as a bomb. I would urge readers to be highly selective about supporting aid agencies who operate under tyrannies. Better yet, go see for yourself: after all, for Canadians, there’s no better time than now to spend a sultry two weeks in Kabul enjoying the charms of the brutal Afghan winter.

By the spring of 2014, U.S. troops had been in Afghanistan for thirteen “brutal Afghan winters.” Yet after the first, we never heard the phrase ever again. The problem in Afghanistan was never the weather
.

THE BRUTAL CUBAN WINTER

The Spectator
, January 26, 2002

NOT FAR FROM ME
, in the small Coos County, New Hampshire, town of Stark, is an old German POW camp. Camp Stark was basically a logging camp with barbed wire. With so many of its men in uniform overseas, the Brown Paper Company agreed to take German prisoners in order to keep its forestry operations going. The detainees arrived in the depths of a White Mountains winter and were not impressed by the huts. There were wire mesh screens on the insides of the windows, so that even when you opened them up you couldn’t stick your hand out. The Germans pointed out that this was in contravention of the internationally agreed rules on prisoner accommodation, and insisted that the screens be removed immediately.

The camp guards looked at each other, shrugged, and said, “Sure, if that’s what you want.” The deep winter snows melted, and eventually it was safe to open the windows. A week later, Black Fly Season arrived—the black fly isn’t New Hampshire’s state animal but it ought to be—and thousands of the little fellers swarmed in through those big inviting apertures to chow down on all that good Aryan blood. There was a reason for the screens.

I mention this to make two points: (1) there are things that are unforeseen by international conventions, and (2) let’s talk about the weather. The British, if you’ll forgive a gratuitous racist generalization, seem to be remarkably obtuse about matters meteorological. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of living in a country where it’s 54 and overcast all summer and 53 and overcast all winter, and the only divergence from that temperate constancy was
missed entirely by your famous Mr. Fish.
¹
But at least in the old days Britons were ignorant but fearless: you were the mad dogs and Englishmen out in the midday sun. Now, after four months of cowering in fear at the impending arrival of the entirely mythical “brutal Afghan winter”—currently 55 and sunny in Kandahar—Fleet Street’s media doom-mongers have moved seamlessly on to the horrors of the brutal Cuban winter: oh my God, how will these poor al-Qaeda boys—you know, the ones who could supposedly hole up in the Khyber Pass eating scorpions all winter making a fool of those Yank ignoramuses—how will these fearsome warriors survive the Caribbean nights and the hordes of malaria-infested mosquitoes?

And this time it’s not just the usual America haters at
The Guardian
and the BBC but the likes of Alice Thomson, Stephen Glover, Alasdair Palmer, Matthew Parris, my most esteemed
Telegraph
and
Speccie
colleagues: “They are kept in cramped outdoor cages, open to the elements and the attentions of possibly malarial mosquitoes,” notes Mr. Glover. “I mind the shark cages, with their concrete floors open to the elements and the 24-hour halogen flood lights, left near mosquito-infested swamps, so the prisoners can catch malaria when some already have tuberculosis,” frets Miss Thomson.

I don’t know whether Alice or Stephen has ever been to Disney World. Doesn’t sound quite their bag, but you never know. Disney World is in the middle of a swamp, and, if you use the employees’ exit and turn right rather than left and then on to the dirt track and into the swampy groves you’ll find within minutes the windscreen’s full of squished, bloody bugs. Yet when you’re on the other side of the fence waiting in the hot sun for two hours to go on a sixty-second ride, there are, amazingly, no bugs. Find me a mosquito in Disney World and I’ll guarantee you it’s an animatronic attraction. A local girl up here
ran off to Florida and hooked up with some guy who worked for the Mouse. At their Disney wedding, he told me that, among his responsibilities, he was part of the crew who bombed the perimeter at the crack of dawn each day with industrial-strength bug spray. The same procedure is being carried out at Guantanamo: the camp is sprayed with mosquito repellent.

As for malaria, that seems to have been conjured entirely out of Miss Thomson’s head. There is no malaria in Cuba. None. Risk of contracting malaria: Zero percent. And before you Fidel groupies start putting that down to the wonders of the Cuban health system, do you know who eliminated malaria from the island? The United States Army, after the Spanish-American War and by draining swamps and introducing bed netting and (here they come again) window screens.

So there’s no malaria, and a tiny risk of mosquitoes. As for the “cramped outdoor cages,” they are, in fact, the factory version of Bloody Mary’s exotic hut on the tropic isle of Bali Hai in the current West End production of
South Pacific
. They’ve got roofs, with eight-foot ceilings—not exactly a Kensington drawing room, but hardly “cramped.” As for those concrete floors Alice disdains, all I can say is that a few years back I jacked up my old barn and poured a concrete foundation, and there are truly few more pleasurable sensations on a hot summer’s day than putting one’s bare feet on cold, shaded concrete. So these “shark cages” have sloped roofs and cool floors. Granted, they have no walls. If they did, they’d be sweatboxes that would likely kill you—unless, of course, you installed air-conditioning, which, as we know, you British types find frightfully vulgar.

Nonetheless, according to an ITN report carried on PBS over here, these poor prisoners will have to “endure the searing heat.” Actually, these beach huts are perfectly designed for one of the most agreeable climates on earth—a daytime high in the mid-eighties and an overnight low in the low seventies, with a wafting breeze caressing one’s cheek. My advice to Fleet Street is to steer clear of weather for the rest of the war. The merest nudge of the thermostat is enough to send excitable reporters rocketing from one extreme to the
other, like the old cartoon of the shower faucet with only the tiniest calibration between “Scalding” and “Freezing.” Kabul in the sixties is the “brutal winter,” Cuba in the low seventies is the “searing heat.”

So take it from me, Don Rumsfeld’s Club Fed huts are cool in the day and balmy at night. They’re a lot more comfortable than the windowless “concrete coffins” of Belmarsh in which your terrorist suspects are banged up twenty-two hours a day. True, it’s a shame they have to have wraparound wire mesh to spoil the view, and there’s no banana daiquiris from room service, but the idea is (in case you’ve forgotten) that they’re meant to be prisoners. And, unlike the three-to-a-cell arrangements in, say, Barlinnie, the Talibannies have a room of their own, so they won’t be taking it up the keister from Butch every night. They get three square meals a day, thrice-daily opportunities for showers, calls to prayer, copies of the Koran, a prayer mat—all part of a regime
The Mirror
calls “a sick attempt to appeal to the worst redneck prejudices.”

It’s correct that, for hygiene purposes, they were shaved, which was “culturally inappropriate.” But then, if the U.S. wanted to be culturally appropriate, they’d herd ’em onto a soccer pitch and stone ’em to death as half-time entertainment. As to whether or not they are prisoners of war, there is a legitimate difference of opinion on their status: you can’t ask them for name, rank, and serial number, because the last two they lack and, if Richard Reid is anything to go by, they keep a handy stack of spare monikers. This is new territory. But surely the Fleet Street whingers must know, if only from the testimony of their fellow Britons among the inmates, that there is no “torture” (
The Mail on Sunday
), not even by the weather.

In fairness, instead of coasting on non-existent diseases and wild guesses at the weather, the always elegant Matthew Parris at least attempted to expand Guantanamo into a general thesis. “We seek to project the message that there are rules to which all nations are subject,” he wrote in
The Times
. “America has a simpler message: kill Americans, and you’re dead meat.”

This caused endless amusement over here. As the Internet wag Steven den Beste commented, “By George, I think he’s got it!”

“America has simple gods and likes to keep her satan simple, too,” Mr. Parris continued. “In Salem it was once witches. In Senator Joe McCarthy’s heyday it was Commies. Now it is al-Qa’eda.”

Just for the record, the Salem witch trials were conducted not by citizens of the United States but by British subjects. As for Senator McCarthy’s heyday, well, there were a lot of Commies around: in short order, they’d seized half of Europe, neutered much of what was left, and had become the dominant influence on the Third World’s political class. Suppose America had followed the rest of the west and elected a détente sophisticate like Helmut Schmidt or Pierre Trudeau, whose first act upon retirement from office was to take his young sons to see Siberia because “that was where the future was being made”—in 1984! The world would be very different today, and not to my liking. The west won’t work if every country’s Canada and every leader’s Trudeau. The only thing that enables Belgium to be Belgium and Norway to be Norway and Britain to be Britain is the fact that America’s America—for all the reasons my
Spectator
colleagues deplore.

1
    
Michael Fish is a longtime British telly weatherman, famous for his forecast of October 15, 1987: “A woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way,” he chortled. “Don’t worry, there isn’t!” A couple of hours later, the worst storm in three centuries hit southern England and killed nineteen people.

THE LIMITS

National Review
, December 30, 2008

MY PERSONAL CHRONOLOGY
of the Bush years is simple enough:

For the first eight months, I did shtick. We all did. In April of 2001, he went to Quebec for the Summit of the Americas and was greeted by the then Canadian Prime Minister, whose name escapes me, as I trust it does you. “Bienvenue,” he said to Dubya. “That means ‘Welcome.’” Ha-ha. What fun we had. There were the usual riots, of course, led by that French farmer famous for destroying his local McDonald’s on the grounds that “the free market is violence.” He was accompanied by various weekending trustafarians who’d motored up from the Ivy League, plus large numbers of Canadian students who’d had their exams postponed and were given three hundred thousand dollars of taxpayers’ money in order to enable them to get to Quebec City and smash the place up. I forget what the Summit was about, although I had plenty of one-on-one face-time with lonely Latin American foreign ministers who couldn’t find anyone else to talk to, and I may even have filed a couple of widely unread thumbsuckers on the lines of: “The Guatemalan Deputy Trade Minister gets it. Why don’t we?” In the end, the Summit wasn’t really “about” anything. Not a lot was in those days.

Then came a Tuesday morning in September. And “Steyn butched up,” as a Canadian columnist recently put it. There was a lot of that about. Even mild-mannered coves like the State Department’s Richard Armitage were getting General Musharraf on the phone and threatening to bomb his country back to the Stone Age. The Taliban fell, and Mullah Omar scuttled out of town, hitching up his skirts and pausing only to put a false beard over his real beard, with no time to pack even the Rod Stewart cassettes subsequently found in the compound of the man who famously banned music throughout the land. (The old “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Rod, not the namby-pamby
Rod
Stewart Slays the Great American Songbook
stuff.) When the troops got to Tora Bora, they discovered our enemies really did live in caves. And not the Bond-villain underground lairs the CNN graphics department mocked up—vast inverted Trump Towers burrowing deep into the earth with Osama stroking a Persian as he plotted world domination from the upside-down penthouse in Sub-Basement Level 43—but just regular caves. As in a smelly hole in the ground with a carelessly demarcated communal latrine at the back.