[iwar] [fc:Global.Warmth.For.U.S..After.9/11.Turns.To.Frost]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-08-14 06:51:36
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 06:51:36 -0700 (PDT)
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USA Today
August 14, 2002
Global Warmth For U.S. After 9/11 Turns To Frost
Military plans repulse even European allies
By Ellen Hale, USA Today
OXFORD, England - On a packed train out of London recently to this historic
college town, a young American woman struck up a conversation with her
seatmate, a nattily dressed older British man. They chatted amiably about
Oxford until she worked up the courage to ask what was weighing on her mind:
"Why," she blurted out, "does everybody hate us?"
The man paused - but didn't disagree - before proceeding to enumerate the
reasons, from U.S. foreign policies to the seeping influence of American
popular culture.
In the shock wave that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many
Americans found themselves asking why so many people in Muslim countries
hate the United States. But the anti-American sentiment has turned into a
contagion that is spreading across the globe and infecting even the United
States' most important allies. 
In virulent prose, newspapers criticize the United States. Politicians
ferociously attack its foreign policies, especially the Bush
administration's plans to attack Iraq. And regular citizens launch into
tirades with American friends and visitors.
Here in Britain, the United States' staunchest friend, snide remarks and
downright animosity greet many Americans these days. It's not just religious
radicals and terrorists who resent the United States anymore.
"Now, it's everyone," says Allyson Stewart-Allen, a consultant from
California who has lived in London 15 years and heads International
Marketing Partners, which advises European companies on how to do business
with Americans. The sea change in attitude toward the United States, she
says, has "profoundly" altered her advice to clients: 
She now must counsel them to resist "taking digs" at her countrymen.
What happened, many Americans are wondering, to that wave of sympathy and
stockpile of global goodwill they encountered after Sept. 11?
"It was squandered," says Meghnad Desai, director of the Institute for
Global Governance at the London School of Economics and Political Science
and a member of the House of Lords. 
"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," he says.
Desai and others blame what seems to be a wave of new U.S. policies that
they regard as selfish and unilateral, stretching back to President Bush's
refusal last year to support the international treaty on global warming. 
Many are enraged by Bush's support for steel tariffs and farm subsidies, his
refusal to involve the United States in the new international criminal court
and what is widely regarded abroad as one-sided support for Israel and its
prime minister, Ariel Sharon. 
The rash of corporate malfeasance and blanket arrest of terrorism suspects
after Sept. 11 further fuels critics, who say the United States preaches
democracy, human rights and free enterprise - but doesn't practice them. 
In a recent article in Policy Review magazine, Robert Kagan, a senior
associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington,
says the divide between the United States and Europe is getting wider than
ever as the continents go their different ways - one operating on a foreign
policy based on unilateralism and coercion, the other on diplomacy and
persuasion. 
Europeans, he says, 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." 
The differences, he says, are deep and likely to endure.
"Why do people attack Americans?" asks Tiny Waslandek, a social worker in
Amsterdam, Netherlands. "Because they have a big, big mouth and they mind
everybody's business."
Bush's plan to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein is stoking anti-American
hostility to bonfire levels. In Germany earlier this month, Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder launched his re-election campaign by denouncing what he
derisively called Bush's proposed military "adventures" in Iraq. In England,
the new head of the Anglican Church and other leading bishops circulated a
petition proclaiming that any attack would be illegal and immoral.
"My sense is that much of the rampant anti-Americanism we see now is very
much linked to a war with Iraq and the Israel-Palestine issue," says Mary
Kaldor, a London-based scholar on international relations.
In the popular Straw Poll BBC radio show July 26, Kaldor debated with
Washington Post reporter T. R. Reid whether "American power is the power of
the good." She argued that the U.S. role as the sole superpower was a danger
to the rest of the world.
At the end of the program, 70% of the studio audience said it agreed with
her. 
Anti-Americanism is nothing new. Surveys a decade ago in Britain showed that
one in four people here are what pollster Robert Worcester, a transplanted
Kansan who runs the Market Opinion Research Institute, calls "culturally
anti-American." 
(According to a survey taken in 1989, one in five said they found American
accents irritating.)
To some degree, the resentment against the United States is inevitable now
that it's the only remaining superpower. Even so, Desai, who says that he is
"very, very pro-America" and that people forget the United States saved
Europe from itself twice in the past century, notes that America has been on
top for a long time. "So what is happening now is not the inevitable result
of being No. 1."
(Desai and many other Europeans give Washington credit for dismantling the
hard-line Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which harbored Osama bin Laden and
his al-Qaeda terrorist network).
In recent months, polls have shown a less-than subtle change in attitudes
toward Americans, U.S. foreign policy and, in particular, the president from
Texas. British newspapers reported Thursday that secret polls commissioned
by Prime Minister Tony Blair revealed "spectacular unpopularity" for Bush
among voters here.
In April, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that less than half
(48%) of Germans consider the United States a guarantor of peace in the
world, compared with 62% who did in 1993. Nearly half - 47% - rated
Americans as aggressive rather than peaceful (34%). And 44% called them
superficial. 
Meanwhile, in an April poll for the Council on Foreign Relations, based in
Washington, Europeans proved highly critical of Bush and what they label his
unilateral approach to foreign policy: 85% of Germans, 80% of French, 73% of
Britons and 68% of Italians said they believed that the United States is
acting in its own interest in the war on terrorism. 
Philadelphia transplant Susan Steele, head of Forum management company in
London, has noticed that many Europeans have started using the phrase
"that's American," which is shorthand, Steele says, for "not taking anyone
else into consideration."
"People here were truly shocked and horrified by Sept. 11," says Marjorie
Thompson, an American who runs the consulting group C3I in London. "But
since then, they've come to believe that the United States is using that as
an excuse for a unilateral foreign policy, and they're starting to make
sweeping anti-American comments."
Even British pop star George Michael and tennis pro Martina Navratilova have
taken swings at the United States. Last month, Michael declared he was
"definitely not anti-American" after receiving criticisms for his new
single, Shoot the Dog, which lampooned the relationship between Bush and
Blair.
In June, Navratilova, a Czech native who became a U.S. citizen 20 years ago,
had to defend herself after writing an article for a German newspaper in
which she said that the United States now "oppressed opinion" and that
decisions there were based "solely on how much money will come out of it." 
That the United States is suffering an image problem abroad has become
obvious at home. Two weeks ago, the White House announced it would create a
permanent Office of Global Communications to enhance America's image around
the world. At the same time, the House of Representatives approved spending
$225 million on cultural and information programs abroad, mostly targeting
Muslim countries, to correct what Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., called a
"cacophony of hate and misinformation" about the United States.
Meanwhile, the Council on Foreign Relations simultaneously issued a biting
report warning the Bush administration that it urgently needs to upgrade its
efforts at public diplomacy to counteract the country's "shaky" image
abroad.
It called for a range of actions, from increased spending on polling of
foreign public opinion and more training of foreign service officers to
giving journalists from other countries access to top U.S. government
officials. 
The consequences of neglecting such public diplomacy are "ominous," warns
Peter Peterson, chairman of the council and of The Blackstone Group, a New
York private investment bank. He says bin Laden has "gleefully exploited"
the United States' poor public image.
"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," Peterson says. "This is not a Muslim country issue.
It has metastasized to the rest of the world and includes some of our
closest European allies."
New Yorker Julia Magnet, a journalist who just moved to London, found that
out when she decided to throw a Fourth of July party for British friends.
Between grilled sausages and chocolate cake, her friends launched an attack
on Bush and the United States. They called Bush a "homicidal maniac" and
"stupid" and the United States the "world's biggest terrorist."
Magnet, 22, was forgiving, and she labeled their assault "uninformed" and
"ignorant." 
Nevertheless, she was surprised by the venom in their words. 
"What I hear from people all the time now is that we're going to go to war
with just about everyone and we don't need a coalition to do it," Magnet
says.
"It's obvious they are very, very disturbed by the power America now has."
Contributing: Steven Komarow in Berlin and The Netherlands

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