The latest news from Washington is that the State Department is genuinely concerned that America is not, currently, the most loved country in the world. To understand why this mystifying thing is happening, the department is holding in the first week of September a conference of experts from around the world. About 20 scholars will arrive at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research to give 50 or so top policy-makers of the department their view on the roots of the “rising global tide of anti-Americanism”. According to Richard Boucher, the department’s spokesman, US officials need to under stand “...the sources and causes and reasons that people don’t like us in some places, if we’re going to counteract that.”
As many in this part of the world may have been led to believe by the words of some of the mightiest and highest in America, the sentiment does not seem to spring from the envy evil people have for the freedoms, values and democracy of America. If that were so, why should the department’s analysts have been looking at the anti-Americanism in Europe? Whatever Europe may envy America for, it cannot be for its freedoms, values and democracy. The continent has as much of them as America has.
What will the scholars’ prescription be? Judging from all the analyses that have been finding favor in Washington, it is a fair guess that it will boil down to more regime changes, more “axes of evil” and more pre-emptive strikes.
As many non-Americans see it, there is another, though less scholarly, way to understand why people in some places “don’t like” Americans; that is to listen to the sentiments in Europe, Russia and the Muslim world — the regions the State Department is reported to have listed as areas of concern - as well as other nations and peoples.
If they are listened to, America will realize that it will take a hard search to find, barring madcaps, a nation or a people, anywhere in the world, who have, in all these years, wanted America or American people destroyed or shamed. They have not wanted that because, until lately, America was for them a beacon of hope. It was not its money or power. For them, America represented certain values. The citizens of former colonies remember America as the nation whose pressure was decisive in forcing the British, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and all other colonialists to roll up their empires and go home. The non-Communist world, the Arabs and Muslims in particular, remembers it as the power that backed their struggle to stay free of the Soviet empire. Europe remembers it as the force whose help was crucial in driving Hitler into his bunker and, from there, out of this world.
But that is not the America they see now -- not when they watch Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle or a host of others expound on their vision of the ideal world. What they hear is the voice of a bully whose only concept of justice is having his way, no matter how much it shames or pains others. The Palestinians, for whom America, under George Bush Sr., represented the promise of freedom with dignity, see the same nation today as the most powerful instrument of Zionist malevolence.
Roots of Anti-Americanism? The sole superpower’s conviction that it has the right — and the need — to rub everybody else’s face in the mud. If America can talk itself out of it, it will have no anti-Americanism to counteract.
