one of the best articles i had seen in years... world is what is beyond
the navel gazing 12mile limit border of the northern american continent
where you live...

first find a atlas and look...you maybe be surprised...since 75% of
yanks dont have a idea where some americans states are...

hard to handle the truth being a yank aint it...??? so sad..

like believing iraq was a walk in park.. its really another vietnam....

be the first mother on ya block to have ya kid come home in a box.. 1
2
3
4
what are we fighting for i dont give a damn cause george bush sent us to
die in vietnam


John Mullen wrote:

Richard Bernstein, NYT
Reprinted in the International Herald Tribune.

U.S. is losing the sympathy of the world

BERLIN 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 in the months after the war in Iraq to a
widespread vision of America as an imperial power that has defied
world public opinion in an 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."
.
Across the globe, from Africa to Europe, South America to Southeast
Asia, the war in Iraq has had a major impact on a public opinion that
has moved generally from post-Sept. 11 sympathy to post-Iraq-war
antipathy, or, at least to disappointment over what is seen as the
sole remaining superpower's inclination to act pre-emptively with
neither persuasive reasons nor United Nations approval.
.
To some degree, the resentment is centered on the person of President
George W. Bush, who is seen by many as, at best, an ineffective
spokesman for American interests and, at worst, a gunslinging cowboy
knocking over international treaties and bent on controlling the
world's oil supplies, if not the entire world. Foreign policy experts
point to slowly developing fissures born with the end of the cold war
that emerged only 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," Joseph Joffe, co-editor
of the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, said. "That's what triggered
the counter alliance 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 ebbing international image could rise quickly in response
to events. The Bush administration's recent turn to the United Nations
for help in postwar Iraq may, by stepping away from unilateralism,
represents 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, if given the chance, be happy to
become Americans themselves.
.
Some regions, especially Europe, are split in their view of America's
role, with the governments, and, to a lesser extent, the people, of
the former Soviet Bloc countries much more favorably disposed to
American power than the governments and people of American allies in
Europe, most notably France and Germany.
.
In a strongly allied country like Japan, insecure in the face of a
hostile, nuclear-armed North Korea a short missile distance away,
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 America's
war in Iraq, anti-American feeling has diminished since Sept. 11, and
there seems to be greater understanding and less instinctive criticism
of the United States by government officials and intellectuals. The
Chinese authorities have 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.
.
The prevailing global mood has been expressed in different ways by
many different people, from the hockey fans in Montreal who booed the
American national anthem to the high school students in Switzerland
who don't want to go to the United States as exchange students because
America isn't "in."
.
But even among people who do not believe the various conspiracy
theories that are being bandied about, it is not difficult to hear
very strong denunciations of American policy and a deep questioning of
American motives.
.
"America has taken power over the world," said Dmitri Ostalsky, 25, a
literary critic 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
this: "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," he said.
.
Lydia Adhiamba, a 20-year-old student at the Institute of Advanced
Technology in Nairobi, said that the United States "wants to rule the
whole world, and that's why there's so much animosity to the U.S."
.
This week, the major English language daily newspaper in Indonesia,
The Jakarta Post, ran a prominent article entitled "Why moderate
Muslims are annoyed with America," by Sayidiman Suryohadiprojo.
.
"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."
.
Crucial to global public opinion has been the failure of the Bush
administration to persuade large segments of public opinion of its
justification for going to war in Iraq.
.
In striking contrast to public opinion in the United States, where
polls show a majority believing that there was a connection between
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda terrorists who carried
out the Sept. 11 attacks, the rest of the world does not believe that
argument because, most people say, the evidence has not been produced.
.
This explains the enormous difference in international opinion between
American military action in Afghanistan in the months after Sept. 11,
which seemed to have tacit approval around the world as a legitimate
act of self-defense, and the view of American military action in Iraq,
which is commonly 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,
polls and interviews show sharp drops in public approval of the United
States over the past year.
.
In unabashedly pro-American countries like Poland, perhaps the most
important America ally on Iraq after Britain, polls show 60 percent of
the public opposed to the Polish government's decision to send 2,500
troops in Iraq under overall American command.
.
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 would have resulted in a different set of
attitudes toward the United States.
.
"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."
.
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 between the United States and even many of
its closest former allies.
.
In their view, the Iraq war has not so much caused a new divergence
but highlighted and widened one that has existed at least 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 As a result, America and Europe tend to view
the world differently.
.
"There were deep structural forces before 9/11 that were pushing us
apart," said John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the
University of Chicago and the author of "The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics."
.
He added: "In the absence of the Soviet threat or of an equivalent
threat, there was no way that ties between U.S. 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 war, you could argue that American unilateralism had no cost,"
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 UN. 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 have given a mathematical
expression to these differences. A poll of 8,000 people in Europe and
the United States conducted by the German Marshall Fund of the United
States and the Compagnia di Sao 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 and 48 percent of Europeans supporting force as a
means of imposing international justice.
.
In Europe overall, the number of people who want the United States to
maintain a strong global presence went down 19 percentage 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 international leadership.
.
Many of the difficulties predated Sept. 11, of course. Eberhard
Sandschneider, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations,
has 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," Sandschneider
writes.
.
From this point of view, as Sandschneider and others have said, the
divergence between the United States and many other countries will not
be a temporary phenomenon stemming from the Iraqi war, but a permanent
aspect of the international scene.
.
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 now have a
favorable impression of the United States, down from 60 percent a year
ago.
.
Indonesia may be an especially troubling case to American policymakers
who have hoped that Indonesia, a moderate country with a relatively
easy-going attitude toward religion, would emerge as a kind of
pro-American Islamic model.
.
But since Sept. 11, a group of extremists known as Jemaah Islamiyah
has gained strength, hitting targets in Bali and Jakarta and making
the country so insecure that Bush may not be able to stop off there
during an Asia trip planned for next month.
.
One well-known mainstream Muslim leader, Din Syamsuddin, the
American-educated vice president of a 30 million-strong Islamic
organization, called the United States the "king of the terrorists"
and referred to Bush as "drunken horse."
.
This turn for the worse has occurred despite a $10 million program by
the State Department called the Shared Values Campaign in which
speakers and short films showing Muslim life in the United States were
sent last fall to Muslim countries, like Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia
and Kuwait.