** Visit AAM's new website! http://www.africanassociation.org **
This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by [log in to unmask]
/-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\
Explore more of Starbucks at Starbucks.com.
http://www.starbucks.com/default.asp?ci=1015
\----------------------------------------------------------/
Foreign Views of U.S. Darken Since Sept. 11
September 11, 2003
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
BERLIN, Sept. 10 - In the two years since Sept. 11, 2001,
the view of the United States as a victim of terrorism that
deserved the world's sympathy and support has given way to
a widespread vision of America as an imperial power that
has defied world opinion through unjustified and unilateral
use of military force.
"A lot of people had sympathy for Americans around the time
of 9/11, but that's changed," said Cathy Hearn, 31, a
flight attendant from South Africa, expressing a view
commonly heard in many countries. "They act like the big
guy riding roughshod over everyone else."
In interviews by Times correspondents from Africa to Europe
to Southeast Asia, one point emerged clearly: The war in
Iraq has had a major impact on public opinion, which has
moved generally from post-9/11 sympathy to post-Iraq
antipathy, or at least to disappointment over what is seen
as the sole superpower's inclination to act pre-emptively,
without either persuasive reasons or United Nations
approval.
To some degree, the resentment is centered on the person of
President Bush, who is seen by many of those interviewed,
at best, as an ineffective spokesman for American interests
and, at worst, as a gunslinging cowboy knocking over
international treaties and bent on controlling the world's
oil, if not the entire world.
Foreign policy experts point to slowly developing fissures,
born at the end of the cold war, that exploded into view in
the debate leading up to the Iraq war. "I think the
turnaround was last summer, when American policy moved ever
more decisively toward war against Iraq," said Josef Joffe,
co-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit. "That's what
triggered the counteralliance of France and Germany and the
enormous wave of hatred against the United States."
The subject of America in the world is of course
complicated, and the nation's battered international image
could improve quickly in response to events. The Bush
administration's recent turn to the United Nations for help
in postwar Iraq may represent such an event.
Even at this low point, millions of people still see the
United States as a beacon and support its policies,
including the war in Iraq, and would, given the chance, be
happy to become Americans themselves.
Some regions, especially Europe, are split in their view of
America's role: The governments and, to a lesser extent,
the public in former Soviet-bloc countries are much more
favorably disposed to American power than the governments
and the public in Western Europe, notably France and
Germany.
In Japan, a strong American ally that feels insecure in the
face of a hostile, nuclear-armed North Korea, there may be
doubts about the wisdom of the American war on Iraq. But
there seem to be far fewer doubts about the importance of
American power generally to global stability.
In China, while many ordinary people express doubts about
the war in Iraq, anti-American feeling has diminished since
Sept. 11, 2001, and there seems to be greater understanding
and less instinctive criticism of the United States by
government officials and intellectuals. The Chinese
leadership has largely embraced America's "war on terror."
Still, a widespread and fashionable view is that the
United States is a classically imperialist power bent on
controlling global oil supplies and on military domination.
That mood has been expressed in different ways by different
people, from the hockey fans in Montreal who boo the
American national anthem to the high school students in
Switzerland who do not want to go to the United States as
exchange students because America is not "in." Even among
young people, it is not difficult to hear strong
denunciations of American policy and sharp questioning of
American motives.
"America has taken power over the world," said Dmitri
Ostalsky, 25, a literary crtic and writer in Moscow. "It's
a wonderful country, but it seized power. It's ruling the
world. America's attempts to rebuild all the world in the
image of liberalism and capitalism are fraught with the
same dangers as the Nazis taking over the world."
A Frenchman, Jean-Charles Pogram, 45, a computer
technician, said: "Everyone agrees on the principles of
democracy and freedom, but the problem is that we don't
agree with the means to achieve those ends. The United
States can't see beyond the axiom that force can solve
everything, but Europe, because of two world wars, knows
the price of blood."
Lydia Adhiamba, a 20-year-old student at the Institute of
Advanced Technology in Nairobi, Kenya, said the United
States "wants to rule the whole world, and that's why
there's so much animosity to the U.S."
The major English language daily newspaper in Indonesia,
The Jakarta Post, recently ran a prominent article titled,
"Why moderate Muslims are annoyed with America," by
Sayidiman Suryohadiprojo, a prominent figure during the
Suharto years.
"If America wants to become a hegemonic power, it is rather
difficult for other nations to prevent that," he wrote.
"However, if America wants to be a hegemonic power that has
the respect and trust of other nations, it must be a benign
one, and not one that causes a reaction of hate or fear
among other nations."
Bush as Salesman
Crucial to global opinion has been the failure of the Bush
administration to persuade large segments of the public of
its justification for going to war in Iraq.
In striking contrast to opinion in the United States, where
polls show a majority believe there was a connection
between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda terrorists, the rest of
the world remains skeptical.
That explains the enormous difference in international
opinion toward American military action in Afghanistan in
the months after Sept. 11, which seemed to have tacit
approval as legitimate self-defense, and toward American
military action in Iraq, which is seen as the arbitrary act
of an overbearing power.
Perhaps the strongest effect on public opinion has been in
Arab and Muslim countries. Even in relatively moderate
Muslim countries like Indonesia and Turkey, or countries
with large Muslim populations, like Nigeria, both polls and
interviews show sharp drops in approval of the United
States.
In unabashedly pro-American countries like Poland, perhaps
the staunchest American ally on Iraq after Britain, polls
show 60 percent of the people oppose the government's
decision to send 2,500 troops to Iraq.
For many people, the issue is not so much the United States
as it is the Bush administration, and what is seen as its
arrogance. In this view, a different set of policies and a
different set of public statements from Washington could
have resulted in a different set of attitudes.
"The point I would make is that with the best will in the
world, President Bush is a very poor salesman for the
United States, and I say that as someone who has no animus
against him or the United States," said Philip Gawaith, a
financial communications consultant in London. "Whether
it's Al Qaeda or Afghanistan, people have just felt that
he's a silly man, and therefore they are not obliged to
think any harder about his position."
Trying to Define 'Threat'
But while the public statements
of the Bush administration have not played well in much of
the world, many analysts see deeper causes for the rift
that has opened. In their view, the Iraq war has not so
much caused a new divergence as it has highlighted and
widened one that existed since the end of the cold war. Put
bluntly, Europe needs America less now that it feels less
threatened.
Indeed, while the United States probably feels more
threatened now than in 1989, when the cold war ended,
Europe is broadly unconvinced of any imminent threat.
"There were deep structural forces before 9/11 that were
pushing us apart," said John J. Mearsheimer, professor of
political science at the University of Chicago and the
author of "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics." "In the
absence of the Soviet threat or of an equivalent threat,
there was no way that ties between us and Europe wouldn't
be loosened.
"So, when the Bush Administration came to power, the
question was whether it would make things better or worse,
and I'd argue that it made them worse."
"In the cold war you could argue that American
unilateralism had no cost," Professor Mearsheimer
continued. "But as we're finding out with regard to Iraq,
Iran and North Korea, we need the Europeans and we need
institutions like the U.N. The fact is that the United
States can't run the world by itself, and the problem is,
we've done a lot of damage in our relations with allies,
and people are not terribly enthusiastic about helping us
now."
Recent findings of international surveys illustrate those
divergences.
A poll of 8,000 people in Europe and the United States
conducted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States
and Compagnia di São Paolo of Italy found Americans and
Europeans agreeing on the nature of global threats but
disagreeing sharply on how they should be dealt with.
Most striking was a difference over the use of military
force, with 84 percent of Americans but only 48 percent of
Europeans supporting force as a means of imposing
international justice.
In Europe overall, the proportion of people who want the
United States to maintain a strong global presence fell 19
points since a similar poll last year, from 64 percent to
45 percent, while 50 percent of respondents in Germany,
France and Italy express opposition to American leadership.
Many of the difficulties predated Sept. 11, of course.
Eberhard Sandschneider, director of the German Council on
Foreign Relations, listed some in a recent paper: "Economic
disputes relating to steel and farm subsidies; limits on
legal cooperation because of the death penalty in the
United States; repeated charges of U.S. `unilateralism'
over actions in Afghanistan; and the U.S. decisions on the
ABM Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal
Court and the Biological Weapons Protocol."
"One could conclude that there is today a serious question
as to whether Europe and the United States are parting
ways," Mr. Sandschneider writes.
From this point of view, as he and others have said, the
divergence will not be a temporary phenomenon but
permanent.
A recent survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project showed
a growth of anti-American sentiment in many non-European
parts of the world. It found, for example, that only 15
percent of Indonesians have a favorable impression of the
United States, down from 61 percent a year ago.
Indonesia may be especially troubling to American policy
makers, who have hoped that, as a country with an
easy-going attitude toward religion, it would emerge as a
kind of pro-American Islamic model.
But since Sept. 11, a virulent group of extremists known as
Jemaah Islamiyah has gained strength, attacking in Bali and
Jakarta and making the country so insecure that President
Bush may skip it during an Asian trip planned for next
month.
One well-known mainstream Indonesian Muslim leader, Din
Syamsuddin, an American-educated vice president of a
Islamic organization that claims 30 million members, calls
the United States the "king of the terrorists" and refers
to President Bush as a "drunken horse."
This turn for the worse has occurred despite a $10 million
program by the State Department in which speakers and short
films showing Muslim life in the United States were sent
last fall to Muslim countries, including Indonesia.
A Residue of Good Will
Still, broad sympathy for the
United States exists in many areas. Students from around
the world clamor to be educated in America. The United
States as a land of opportunity remains magnetic.
Some analysts point out that the German Marshall Fund study
actually showed a great deal of common ground across the
Atlantic.
"Americans and Europeans still basically like each other,
although such warmth has slipped in the wake of the Iraq
war," Ronald Asmus, Philip P. Everts and Pierangelo
Isernia, analysts from the United States, the Netherlands
and Italy, respectively, wrote in an article explaining the
findings. "Americans and Europeans do not live on different
planets when it comes to viewing the threats around them."
But there is little doubt that the planets have moved
apart. Gone are the days, two years ago, when 200,000
Germans marched in Berlin to show solidarity with their
American allies, or when Le Monde, the most prestigious
French newspaper, could publish a large headline, "We Are
All Americans."
More recently, Jean Daniel, the editor of the weekly Nouvel
Observateur, published an editorial entitled, "We Are Not
All Americans."
For governments in Eastern Europe, Sept. 11 has forced a
kind of test of loyalties. Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, the
Czech Republic and Poland have felt themselves caught
between the United States and the European Union, which
they will soon be joining.
Here, too, the war in Iraq seems to have been the defining
event, the division of Europe into "new" and "old" halves,
defined by their willingness to support the American-led
war.
Most Eastern European countries side with the European
Union majority on such questions as the International
Criminal Court, which is opposed by the Bush
administration, while helping in various ways with the Iraq
war. Poland and Romania have sent troops and Hungary has
permitted training of Iraqis at a military base there.
But even if the overall mood in the former Soviet Bloc
remains largely pro-American, recent polls have shown some
slippage in feelings of admiration.
"We would love to see America as a self-limiting
superpower," said Janusz Onyszkiewicz, a former Polish
defense minister.
Perhaps the administration's decision to turn to the United
Nations to seek a mandate for an international force in
Iraq reflects a new readiness to exercise such restraint.
The administration appears to have learned that using its
power in isolation can get very expensive very quickly.
But the road to recovering global support is likely to be a
long one for a country whose very power - political,
economic, cultural, military - makes it a natural target of
criticism and envy.
Even in Japan, where support for America remains strong,
the view of the United States as a bully has entered the
popular culture. A recent cartoon showed a character
looking like President Bush in a Stars and Stripes vest
pushing Japanese fishermen away from a favorite spot,
saying, "I can fish better."
Contributing to this report were James Brooke, Frank Bruni,
Alan Cowell, Ian Fisher, Joseph Kahn, Clifford Krauss, Marc
Lacey, Jane Perlez, Craig S. Smith and Michael Wines.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/international/11OPIN.html?ex=1064289127&ei=1&en=e422d7bbcab62a6a
---------------------------------
Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine
reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like!
Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy
now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here:
http://www.nytimes.com/ads/nytcirc/index.html
HOW TO ADVERTISE
---------------------------------
For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters
or other creative advertising opportunities with The
New York Times on the Web, please contact
[log in to unmask] or visit our online media
kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo
For general information about NYTimes.com, write to
[log in to unmask]
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, visit:
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/aam.html
AAM Website: http://www.africanassociation.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
