Angst and Anti-Americanism

Even if you have to sit through ad, I urge you to read this fascinating article in Salon called “America’s blankness,” which was originally a prepared speech by professor Stephen Holmes.

He explores the roots and reasons for the growth in anti-Americanism and asks if it matters. (It does.) He examines how it happened and what actions the US took that precipitated this surge of ill feeling toward us. And he suggests various ways in which we might turn some of this around in a new administration.

The way he sees it, the Europeans are freaked out by Bush, but will put it behind them if we kick him out and behave in a more civilized fashion. If Kerry wins, Holmes suggests that he may robustly renew the Atlantic alliance on the basis of the shared threats faced by both Americans and Europeans: nuclear proliferation and terrorist attacks on major cities. After Madrid, we should be able to enlist the Europeans, whose security agencies have much more experience with infiltration and intelligence gathering of terrorists than we do. It would be very helpful if we could all sincerely work together on this. It’s a terrible failure of foreign policy and national security that Bush has poisoned this necessary relationship.

Anti-Americanism in the mid-east, on the other hand, has morphed into hatred. And the probable consequences of that are even worse than I thought. The most obvious result is that we are creating terrorists in exponentially greater numbers than we are killing them. That is not a winning strategy.

But, we have also succeeded in doing the precise opposite of what we intended with Bush’s long term democratization strategy by strengthening autocratic regimes as they borrow our rhetoric on the WOT and crack down on their own people. The region is becoming less democratic rather than more and even those that are democratic hate our guts too. This Iraq project is a huge failure on all levels. Holmes’s scenario of what is likely to happen in iraq is both depressing and scary. It was a mistake from the beginning, but the cock-up of the occupation and the lack of planning is simply unforgiveable.

On the grand global scale, we have destroyed the mystique of American power, a subject that Michael Lind explores in this very interesting piece and I discussed here some time back. Showing our weaknesses at this particular time makes it much more likely that our enemies will feel emboldened or will make a mistake. There are huge consequences to this sad performance in Iraq, but none are bigger than that. That it was done unnecessarily makes it a crime.

Clearly, anti-Americanism has increased hugely since 9/11 all over the globe. There is no good reason why that needed to happen. We were the victims and the entire world was in sympathy with us until the Bush administration began to behave irrationally.

The GOP has recently been using the orwellian argument that to vote for Kerry is to vote for the terrorists even though we are demonstrably less safe under Bush’s policies. They’ve been trying to innoculate themselves from this glaring fact since 9/11 by silencing dissent and forcefeeding the nation a diet of fear and fantasy to hide the fact they have been screwing things up from the beginning.

The real argument is that a vote for Bush is to validate his failed policies and convince the rest of the world that we truly are nation of dangerous fools. This will not increase our safety, I’m afraid. In fact, nothing could help the terrorists more than to put this rogue administration back in office.