John McCain on David Cameron

27 September 2006

In this exclusive interview, the Republican presidential front-runner tells Matthew d’Ancona why he is speaking at the Conservative conference, and says that Cameron has the youth, exuberance and determination to be a Tory JFK

‘The detainee issue is of course a very important one in Europe and there’s no doubt about it,’ he says. ‘When I travel to Europe and to England and talk to young people, their view of the US is directly affected by Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and climate change and I think that it is very important that we get this treatment of detainees right; that we do everything we can to regain the moral high ground. Part of that is not treating people as they treat us. If we did that, then this is moral equivalency between the two. The other aspect of this is that in the United States we need to acknowledge that serious mistakes were made in the conduct of this conflict, and emphasise again and again how difficult this is. One of the biggest mistakes that I think we made in the United States was to somehow make our citizenry believe that this was going to be a very easy kind of a deal.’ He cites Donald Rumsfeld’s famous remark ‘stuff happens’, as well as the President’s ‘mission accomplished’. Such soundbites were, he says, an insult, given what was actually happening in Iraq and the images of bloodshed the whole world could see. ‘So, the one thing I think the American people can take — and I believe that Mr Cameron believes the British people can take — is a dose of reality. A clear depiction of the actual realities of the situation on the ground.’

America, he says, must internationalise once more the war that began with global support immediately after 9/11 — although it is Nato, rather than the UN, that he sees as the logical structure within which to do so. Is there, I ask, a danger that the war on terror could become as divisive for Cameron’s generation as Vietnam was for his?