Wellspring of post-Sept. 11 sympathy, goodwill toward U.S. dries up in 2002

ROBERT RUSSO

Canadian Press

Thursday, December 26, 2002

CREDIT: (AP)



The U.S. slide from sympathy to antipathy has been vertiginous. This new wave of anti-Americanism poses no small danger to President George W. Bush as he hurtles toward what appears to be an inevitable conflict with Iraq. (AP)



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WASHINGTON (CP) - The deadly menace facing the United States isn't restricted to the fanaticism of Osama bin Laden. Pollsters, pundits and even poets said that in the year following the airliner atrocities of Sept. 11, and in the year that lies ahead, the wider threat comes from America's former sympathizers. "America finds itself facing an ideological enemy that may turn out to be harder to defeat than militant Islam: that is to say, anti-Americanism, which is presently taking the world by storm," said novelist Salman Rushdie. A little more than a year ago, the world watched the slaughter of 3,000 innocent Americans on their televisions. Along with the shock and horror came sympathy and solidarity. "We are all American," Jean-Marie Colombani, editor of Le Monde in France, wrote in a front-page editorial the next day. So there is no end of astonishment now in the United States that there is a growing sense outside this country that America might have had it coming. "The solidarity reflex from one year ago has been drowned in a wave that leads one to believe that, in the world, we have all become anti-American," Colambani wrote exactly one year later. Where did the sympathy and stockpile of global goodwill go? "It was squandered," said Meghnad Desai, director of the Institute for Global Governance at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "America dissipated the goodwill out of its arrogance and incompetence. A lot of people who would never ever have considered themselves anti-American are now very distressed with the United States." The U.S. slide from sympathy to antipathy has been vertiginous. This new wave of anti-Americanism poses no small danger to President George W. Bush as he hurtles toward what appears to be an inevitable conflict with Iraq. It would be easy for some Americans to dismiss Colombani's change of heart. France is seen in Washington as the spiritual home of European anti-Americanism. Few here have forgotten that the French National Assembly voted shortly after the Second World War to ban that agent of Yankee cultural subversion - Coca-Cola. But a comprehensive survey recently published by the independent Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press suggests antipathy toward the United States is widespread. The poll of 38,000 people in 44 countries found that favourable impressions of America have declined sharply in recent months. The superpower is regarded by its traditional allies with a profound ambivalence. More than half of all Canadians said the spread of American culture is bad, although three-quarters simultaneously approve of American films, music and television. The percentage of respondents with a positive view of America dropped 22 points in Turkey, 17 in Germany, and eight in Britain over the past 12 months. Unsurprisingly, resentment is most acute in Muslim countries - the very peoples the Americans must win over as they prepare for a war that could remake the face of the Middle East. "Around the world, from Western Europe to the Far East, many see the United States as arrogant, hypocritical, self-absorbed, self-indulgent and contemptuous of others," said Peter Peterson, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. "This is not a Muslim country issue. It has metastasized to the rest of the world and includes some of our closest allies." Bush reacted to his critics with scorn. If Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who was slow to fire an aide who referred to Bush as "a moron," was in the Bush doghouse last year, he wasn't alone. The blackballing of Germany's Gerhard Schroeder shows few signs of abating after his anti-war election campaigning last September. The long list of issues on which the United States and its Canadian and European allies disagree - including climate change, fair trade, protectionism, the international court and how to confront Iraq - showed little evidence of shrinking. "These things stand for something larger, which is our larger obligation to create an integrated world," former president Bill Clinton said last month. "You cannot have an integrated world and have your say all the time. And America can lead the world towards that but we cannot dominate and run the world in that direction. There is a big difference." Bush has been asking and conveniently answering the question of why anyone would hate the United States in almost every speech he's made since Sept. 11. "A lot of young people say, 'Well, why America? Why would anybody want to come after us?' And the answer is - because we love freedom, that's why. And they hate freedom." But that's an attractively easy answer for Bush to provide. If they hate America for what it is, then there is no need for the country to reconsider what it does. "It exonerates him from re-thinking foreign policy," Peterson said. "There is nothing to gain if reflection is irrelevant to the level of anti-Americanism and the level of threat." Indeed, it frees him to pursue any policy he chooses - if the enemy is so fundamentally implacable, then America can be too. The consequences of this kind of diplomacy is "ominous," Peterson said. Bin Laden, who stubbornly remained alive to Bush's chagrin, has "gleefully exploited" the United States' poor public image, Peterson said. That image suffers in the Muslim world in large part because there has been little political action to match America's military muscle-flexing. A Hellfire missile fired from a faraway pilotless drone could kill al-Qaida operatives driving in the Yemeni desert, but it does nothing to address the grievances which made too many in the Muslim world rally to bin Laden's flag. There was no new strategy aimed at ending the West's dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Such a strategy would mean the United States would no longer need to manipulate the region to safeguard their gasoline supply. They could let the peoples of the Arab world choose their own governments. U.S. forces could leave Saudi Arabia, draining one of the sores bin Laden most likes to inflame: the presence of "infidels" on holy Muslim soil. Washington still refuses to pick up where Clinton left off, devoting serious political muscle to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Genuine movement in that area would instantly rob militant Islamists of one of their greatest recruiting pitches. No one really knows what impact all this might have had because it has hardly been tried. Nor has the military component of the war on terror fared much better. Bin Laden was allowed to vanish, along with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who escaped the wrath of the mightiest army in the world reportedly on board a clapped-out motorbike. American intelligence agencies don't inspire too much confidence: they remain at war with each other while their political masters tend to hear only what they want to hear. None of this is a surprise. The prosecutors of the war on terror - who promised to focus like a laser beam - have let their eye wander. Now Americans are told that Saddam is the urgent, No. 1 priority. Bob Graham, the out-going Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, joined some of America's confused allies in calling this switch a woeful error. "If this were 1938, the course advocated by the president . . . would be the equivalent of the Allies' declaring war on Mussolini's Italy but ignoring Hitler's Germany," he said. "We are turning our backs on the greater danger, and pretending not to recognize that an attack on Baghdad could spark the wake-up call to the terrorists sleeping in our midst." That point has been made by France's Jacques Chirac, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai. Their advice has gone unheeded in the White House, fuelling the America-bashing. Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said the divide between the United States and its allies will get wider if they continue to go their separate ways - one operating on a foreign policy based on unilateralism and coercion, the other on diplomacy and persuasion. U.S. allies have "come to view the United States simply as a rogue colossus, in many respects a bigger threat to (their) pacific ideals than Iraq or Iran." Bush's response to anti-Americanism has been to express befuddlement. "We've never been a nation of conquerors," he said after the Pew survey was released. "We're a nation of liberators." Global respect and resentment of America are equally strongly reflected in the poll's numbers. If the world's only superpower seeks global co-operation rather than the brittle take-it-or-leave-it attitude that characterized the first phase of the war on terror, the world's myriad Coca-Cola drinkers can still be convinced that the Pax Americana, for all its flaws, is still the best pax around. © Copyright 2002 The Canadian Press