A US-based think tank, the Pew Research Center, has researched and written a report showing widespread international opposition to the invasion of Iraq as well as growing skepticism about the US-led war on international terror. The survey on which these hardly surprising conclusions were based was undertaken before the Madrid massacre last week.
What makes the report “A Year After the Iraq War” so timely however is that it identifies a widespread distrust of America throughout the entire world. It is clear that the Bush White House feels nothing but exasperation and impatience at what it sees as the foot-dragging and caution of other governments. Washington has no doubt that the way it is pursuing its war on terror is absolutely right. It is annoyed and frustrated with having to sweet-talk other countries into backing its tough and highly aggressive policies.
Hence the jibes about “Old Europe,” the lionization of British prime minister, Tony Blair, Washington’s one constant ally, and the bullying tactics pursued against anyone who dares to question the way that America is tackling the scourge of terrorism. Yet until Sept. 11 and the savage attacks on US soil, Americans saw terrorism as something that happened everywhere else. That the Middle East and Europe had been regular victims of terror attacks did not concern most Americans.
American policy in the Middle East for half-a-century has been characterized by a startling absence of understanding. America is so certain of its own cultural values, so complacent in its great economic strength and so blinded by its military power that it has rarely paused to concern itself with trying to understand a complex region with rich and diverse cultures of its own. America took over British and French hegemony in the region without the recognition shared by these old imperial powers that it was necessary to work with the local peoples, not simply seek to dragoon them into policies and actions which Washington considered correct.
There have been times when informed Arabists in the State Department have been listened but the present period of the Bush presidency has not been one of them. The White House has even taken its relations with Europe, which it ought to understand well, to the very edge of rupture. It is hardly surprising that many in Europe do not think that America knows what it is doing.
The tragedy is that America needs to play a leading role in the war against international terror but not as a ringmaster whipping recalcitrant allies into formation and acquiescence. It will take more than stubbornness, brute force and toughness to defeat Al-Qaeda. America has to listen to others and abandon the idea that those who question the way it is acting are in some way also opposing both America and the war on terror itself.
