Salon: America's Blankness -- Bushist Militarism Has Exposed US Weaknesses

[BurtWorm]

By Stephen Holmes

A professor explains why so many people around the world hate us and what a post-Bush foreign policy might look like.

Editor's note: This article is adapted from a speech given in Tysons Corner, Va., on May 27 to several hundred U.S. intelligence analysts from various agencies at their request.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/06/17/anti_americanism/print.html

Neither in Europe nor in the Middle East is anti-Americanism simply a product of the Iraq war. Anyone in touch with foreign colleagues who have recently visited the U.S. has certainly been regaled with stories of the many petty humiliations associated with our newly tightened and irrationally vexing visa regime. But the Iraq war has certainly had a massive impact, and not only on U.S. credibility abroad. What we face here is not merely skepticism but also burning rage, a passionate antipathy that, although far from uniform, does seem ubiquitous. Even now, however, America's critics continue to distinguish between the U.S. administration, which they fear and despise, and the American people, with whom they feel sympathy.

But the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison may have finally changed that. If the American electorate, knowing what it knows and, above all, having seen what it has seen, proceeds to reelect George W. Bush in November, the moderating distinction between the American administration and the American people will be eroded or perhaps erased -- with what violent consequences no one can predict.

Before discussing the concrete repercussions of anti-Americanism in Europe and the Middle East, I want to pause briefly to say a word about a famous phrase of Machiavelli's, frequently cited by neoconservatives in the run-up to the Iraq war, that "it is better to be feared than loved." This quotation is interesting mostly for what it omits. For Machiavelli quickly went on to add: "It is worst of all to be hated." People who fear us, for the most part, will dare not harm us. But fear, according to Machiavelli, works too slowly on the human spirit to obstruct the effects of the searing hatred that drives men immediately and impulsively to furious action. The administration is wrong, therefore, to believe that it can easily scare people into abandoning their plots to injure Americans. U.S. shows of force invariably provoke rage; and this rage, in turn, often overrides the trepidation that our military superiority instills.

Machiavelli might well have added that "worst of all is to be hated without being feared" -- the unenviable position into which the U.S. has recklessly cast itself, with what consequences, I believe, no one can tell. Reduced fear of the U.S., in fact, may be one of the most paradoxical outcomes of the war in Iraq. By exposing, in such an eye-catching fashion, the limits of U.S. military power, the administration has unintentionally reduced anxiety in Syria and Iran. What countries will now fear an American invasion? Who will henceforth believe our bluffs?

...


About the writer
Stephen Holmes is research director and professor at the Center for Law and Security at New York University School of Law.

[htuttle]

1. Good points, and I've been thinking about this myself

I think the US military has gone from being known as the 'greatest military power on Earth' to now being thought of as the 'most expensive military power on Earth'.

If there has been a more obvious lesson in the limits of power in recent memory than the invasion of Iraq, I can't think of one.

[BurtWorm]

2. Nice turn of phrase, htuttle!

And true. We have gone from being known as the greatest to the most bloated. :toast:

[Veggie Meathead]

4. Along with this outcome let me add another.For nearly two

centuries the United States was seen as a power which stood for justice.In a matter of three short years this administration has managed to shatter that belief and the goodwill that came from it.The consequence of the loss is the perception that the US is now nothing more than another Western state drunk with power and creating havoc in societies that are powerless to put up a resistance. A worldwide hatred of the US that you describe for many decades to come has been born with what consequences one cannot even possibly imagine at this stage.

[Hoping4Change]

5. I don't think that a change in opinion about US military is

confined to the fiasco in Iraq. I think US military suffered an enormous blow to its prestige with the relations yesterday at the 9/11 hearings. The military were exposed as keystone cops.

[Hoping4Change]

3. ***********This is a MUST READ*********************

The observation that "searing hatred drives men immediately and impulsively to furious action..." is right on the mark. Shrubco is playing with fire which it wou't be able to contain.

And I agree wholeheartedly that should Bush get re-elected, world opinion will not distinguish between the Administration and Americans it does now.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

6. The truth is our much vaunted military is a flop.

What very few seem to notice is that we have 130,000 troops bogged down in a 3rd world country unable to defeat, or even contain, a bunch of ragtag rebels. All at the cost of $3billion a month. Not to mention our other "bring it on" triumph in Afghanistan, where we have installed "democracy" and "freedom". The poppy fields are flourishing again, and the warlords are getting rich and our "freind" Pakistan teeters on the edge of chaos armed with nukes.

Meanwhile the brilliant strategists in the White House and Pentagon plot for future conflicts to protect our "vital interests" and try to convince us that we need "Star Wars" to protect us from guys armed with hand grenades and strap on bombs.

[Bandit]

8. Kind of like our War on Drugs

We are being seen as very ineffective hypocrites. We have the most modern and best trained police force in the world but can't stop crime. Go figure :shrug: You teach people that violence stops violence and all you get is more violence. Death Penalty anyone. Only in America.

[Armstead]

7. Kick

This explains very well what has been in the back of many of our minds.

The fact is that the invasion of Iraq has shown us to be weaker than our image -- not stronger.

If only the hawkish Bish supporters would realize that central fact.

[Veggie Meathead]

9. The world's perceptions of America have undergone two

radical changes as a consequence of the War on Iraq. First, this country which, at Nuremberg declared aggressive war to be illegal
concocted a new Doctrine of Preemptive War which George McGovern correctly has called an aggressive war in a new disguise.When such a preemptive war is based on phony pretexts which are ever changing,it is a wonder that the people of the world do not hate us more;the hypocrisy is simply overwhelming.The second,are the images from Abu Ghraib which give the lie to the notion that whatever this country does it obeys international laws and treats prisoners humanely.From what Sy Hersh is reporting this is only the tip of the iceberg and more atrocities are likely to emerge from illegal detention camps located in several countries.If these are also laid bare, and we elect Bush and his gang in 2004 instead of indicting them all for crimes against humanity we will deserve all the hatred those actions and our endorsement of those actions entail.

[BurtWorm]

10. Furthermore, the Bushists' bucking of the ICC is looking more and more

like part of the plan, as though they knew they were going to be using techniques that would land them in international criminal court.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

11. Well, everyone knows that our troops only hand out candy bars.

To smiling children and crowds of civilians waving American flags grateful for being "liberated". We can see it every day on TV..can't we?

Our staunch defenders of "freedom" entertain helpless prisoners with harmless party games and friendly doggies. Not to mention occasionally beating them to death.

War crimes? Nah. Besides we can trust the military to investiagate itself.

[Karenina]

19. Most often fielded question

HOW the HELL does Rumsfeld still have a job?

If anyone recalls, a number of politcos in a number of countries were forced to resign for merely suggesting publicly (or caught on tape) that your *fearless leader showed signs of being several tacos short of a combination plate. Meanwhile NO HEADS HAVE ROLLED for the atrocities that have been committed against others in the name of the American citizen.

NOT. A. ONE.

The distinguishing line is wearing VERY THIN all over the world... :cry:

[BurtWorm]

20. That is an excellent point.

And further proof that there just is no justice in this world.

[BurtWorm]

12. A little more of a taste: **The Breakdown of Checks and Balances**

But what are the practical consequences of anti-Americanism in Europe and the Middle East? In Europe, needless to say, America's military adventurism will not discredit the idea of democracy itself, though it has already damaged the reputation of America's democratic institutions, especially our system of checks and balances. The institutions designed to facilitate political self-correction seem to have completely broken down. This includes, first of all, our ordinary constitutional procedures for legislative and judicial oversight of executive action. But it also includes the poor performance of the celebrated American media. Even the New York Times has now confessed to having uncritically passed on disinformation provided by Iraqi exiles with strong reasons for exaggerating the real threat.

Those worried by the unraveling of the Atlantic alliance have been especially shocked by the clashing coverage of the Iraq war in the U.S. and European media. American and European television viewers have seen two different wars, making rational transatlantic discussion of the subject almost impossible. Unlike Americans, moreover, Europeans are acutely aware of the discrepancy in news coverage. They attribute it to what they see as America's post-9/11 autism, a screening out of information that clashes with a set of fixed ideas.

From 9/11 Americans should have learned the importance, for U.S. national security, of accurate, deep and up-to-date knowledge of political instability around the world. Political violence, in any possible country, is never farther than a plane ride away from major U.S. urban centers. But instead of creating a national appetite for knowledge about the world, 9/11 had the opposite effect. It seems to have traumatized Americans, making them even less interested than before in non-American goings-on and points of view. Our capacity to see ourselves through the eyes of others was never great. But after 9/11, Americans seem to have withdrawn even further into themselves.

One symptom of America's growing disconnect from the world, and especially from its former Cold War allies, is the administration's reliance on language that is unintelligible to Europeans. An example is the claim, often advanced by President Bush, that we are currently engaged in a world war between "democracy and terrorism." This is a confusing way to speak because the same terrorist network that attacked the U.S. has also attacked Saudi Arabia, a tribal monarchy that bears no resemblance to a democracy.

But the unintelligibility of Bush's formulation runs much deeper. Roughly speaking, "democracy" is a system that allows those who are directly affected by decisions to exert some influence on the decision makers, ideally by periodically reelecting them or ousting them from office. This simple definition makes clear why Europeans and others greet Bush's endless claims to be "spreading democracy" with such disbelief. Throughout the world, people who were never consulted, even casually, are profoundly affected every day by decisions made in Washington. America's blankness about the downstream effects on other countries of its actions is without question one of the principal sources of anti-Americanism in Europe and elsewhere.

[Veggie Meathead]

14. The terrorist network that has attacked the U.S. and Saudi

Arabia has, strangely has not touched any of the European Countries
including Britain.This leads me to the Dog That Didn't Bark theory.
Are the terrorists really Muslim Fundamentalists? If so, you would think that in France, Britain, Geramny and several other European Countries which have large Muslim immigrant populations at least a few terrorist incidents would have occurred after 9/11.Why haven't they?

[Hoping4Change]

16. You're frogetting Madrid.

[BurtWorm]

13. How Europe views Kerry

<more from the article>



Terrorism is by nature unpredictable. But European-American relations will also be transformed to some extent by a perfectly predictable event, the American presidential election. So I should mention the almost messianic hopes that America's traditional friends in Europe are now investing in John Kerry. This remarkable faith suggests, first of all, that residual pro-American feelings exist just beneath the surface in Europe, even though no one can imagine a repair in U.S.-European relations if Bush stays in office, this time released from the first-termer's need to mollify his electorate. The hopes that political elites in Europe place in Kerry are easy to explain psychologically. Politically serious Europeans recognize that there are no effective solutions to many of the world's greatest problems without American support and leadership.

Some European commentators have said that there are few doctrinal differences, in foreign policy, between Kerry and Bush. But they quickly add that removing Bush from office in November will still make a decisive difference to international security, including the global struggle against terrorism. The need to correct grievous errors alone speaks for the importance of putting a new foreign policy team into the White House, a group that has no incentive to conceal embarrassing blunders or to continue failed policies.

But other European commentators go further, expecting Kerry to rebuild the Atlantic alliance on a wholly new basis. Bush acceded to the presidency, they say, with the conviction that the collapse of the USSR combined with America's military superiority made the Atlantic alliance essentially otiose. Europeans did not see Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat. But America didn't care because it could invade Iraq with or without the help of its former allies.

Kerry, according to his European admirers, should do everything in his power to avoid this slide into gratuitous unilateralism. His first step, they say, should be to soberly examine the principal post-Cold War threats to U.S. national security -- WMD proliferation and non-state terrorist networks plotting mass-casualty attacks on U.S. cities. The national security establishments of our primary European allies say that these are the main threats to European security, too. The perception of shared threats, in fact, provides the obvious starting point for a post-Bush foreign policy. Kerry will easily grasp this point.

[BurtWorm]

15. In the ME, Anti-Americanism is becoming a matter of *identity*

<More from Holmes>

Anti-Americanism in the Middle East, of course, goes deeper and is less likely to die down than anti-Americanism in Europe. The minority of Arabs and Muslims who implacably loathe the U.S. is growing more influential by the day. Those who have traditionally felt friendly or neutral to the U.S. are siding more and more against us. Their hostility, moreover, is becoming less a matter of policy and more a matter of identity. Increasingly, it is impossible to make any claim to an Arab consciousness without railing against the U.S. This is a very dangerous development, since it means that anti-American attitudes are putting more Middle Easterners beyond the reach of diplomacy. Unknown numbers of young men, in particular, are becoming irreconcilable even by dramatic reversals of policy.

It is a mistake to belittle such fury by reciting the tag line, "Yankee go home and take me with you," a reflection of the ambiguity of Middle Eastern attitudes toward the U.S. Economic opportunity will always draw people away from their homes, but it will not necessarily render harmless the seething political anger of their children. So here we have another answer to the question, What concrete dangers does anti-American rage in the Middle East pose to U.S. national security? Anti-American rage is dangerous, as virtually every commentator acknowledges, because it increases the recruitment pool available to al-Qaida and like-minded conspiratorial terrorist bands.

[Hoping4Change]

17. This reminds me of a waiter spitting into the soup of an

bonoxious customer. Waiters may be on the bottom of the totem pole be they can do damage.

[BurtWorm]

18. kick