Yanks are from Mars, Brits are from Venus

MoD documents leaked to Andrew Gilligan show that the ‘special relationship’ in Iraq was more like a bad marriage: riven with misunderstanding, irritation and hurt feelings

It may have made it into such pillars of the zeitgeist as The Simpsons, the film Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Geri Halliwell’s single ‘Bag It Up’. But it is still, perhaps, a little surprising that that seminal work of cod psychology, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, should have infiltrated a secret Ministry of Defence report into the war on Iraq.

Let me tell you, the average MoD leaked document is hard going: thickets of bureaucratic bindweed wrapped tightly around the odd meaningful sentence. Not this time. The set of classified interview transcripts with senior army officers who had returned from Iraq, leaked to me this week, reads like the problem page of Bella magazine, with relationship troubles — special relationship troubles — breaking out all over.

Britain, it seems, was the Venusian, the woman who wanted to have it all — to send tanks, drop bombs, but also cuddle Iraqi children. America was the man who just didn’t appreciate her, just didn’t care. To Colonel J.K. Tanner, Britain’s chief of staff in Iraq, the Americans were indeed ‘a group of Martians’ for whom ‘dialogue is alien’. It’s not the first time it’s been said, of course — a celebrated essay by the US writer Robert Kagan introduced the analogy — but it’s the first time it’s been said officially.

In the reports, the hurt and anguish is clear. Major-general Andrew Stewart, the British commander, described how the overall US commander, General Rick Sanchez, never visited and never called; they didn’t even have a secure communications link.