Anti-Anti-Americanism
Will the U.S. tell the world to take this job and shove it?
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, March 7, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
We're hearing so much these days about anti-Americanism. Let's start a movement of our own: anti anti-Americanism.
An anti anti-American movement would speak out against the current compulsion among intellectuals, here and abroad, to paint the United States as a lonely, lumbering and stupid interloper in the ever-so-complex affairs of a sophisticated world.
• Salman Rushdie in the Guardian newspaper: "America finds itself facing an ideological enemy that may turn out to be harder to defeat than militant Islam: that is to say, anti-Americanism, which is presently taking the world by storm."
• Regis Debray in the New York Times: "The new world of President Bush, postmodern in its technology, seems premodern in its values. In its principles of action, America is two or three centuries behind 'old Europe.'"
• EU Commissioner for External Relations Chris Patten, in a debate at the Trilateral Commission with Richard Perle of the U.S.: "Should America, as the only superpower, camp on its own strength and sovereignty, setting and imposing the rules but not necessarily bound by them, in pursuit of its own national interest?"
Because George W. Bush is going to stick Saddam Hussein in a hole before one more U.S. citizen dies in a repeat of September 11, the Khobar Towers bombing, the U.S. embassy bombings or the USS Cole bombing; because he intends to act before an anthrax-sodden suicide bomber climbs aboard the F train to Brooklyn, every anti-American obsessive in the world feels he has an excuse to start wailing about how America is playing by rules of its own making. Just what is the problem?
These sentiments echo across America's own newspapers, and none more loudly than the one in the American city that still has 16 empty acres called Ground Zero. Yesterday the New York Times' Patrick Tyler, in a front-page "News Analysis" of the Franco-Russian-German veto threat, called it "the loudest 'No!' shouted across the Atlantic in a half-century or more."
Really? The last time I recall the streets of Europe teeming with anti-American sentiment was 20 years ago, over the successful installation in Germany of the Pershing missiles, which began the final chapter in the Cold War. That famous spasm of anti-Americanism was not shared in 1983 by the citizens of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Albania, Macedonia and Croatia--the formerly unfree nations that today call themselves the Vilnius Group and whose leaders last month signed a statement in support of the American position on the Hussein government. What do they know that Salman Rushdie doesn't know?
Reflecting a view of American intentions widely heard the past few months, Vladimir Simonov of Russia's RIA-Novosti news agency asserts that the U.S. purpose in Iraq is to "signify the official transformation of the USA into the center of a global empire in which Washington weighs the fates of governments, divides up others' economic riches and institutes democracy as it, the USA, understands it."
I believe most Americans couldn't care less how Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Mexico or anywhere else chooses to organize itself, were it not for the fact that U.S. citizens inevitably have to die or pay to clean up the mess their dysfunctional economics and politics so often create. Europeans elites don't like having World War II or the cemetery at Normandy thrown back in their faces, but why not? Hitler didn't rise to power on America's watch. The Serbs by now would have slaughtered every non-Serb in the Balkans if the Americans hadn't gone over. The men of France didn't volunteer to die so that South Korea could thrive free of the crazy North. And most of the billions of dollars that the IMF poured into helping Russia stagger through its post-Soviet corruption came out of the pockets of American taxpayers.
In calmer times, anti-American blather dribbles by unnoticed by most Americans, the poor saps, who persist in seeing the world without rancor. But not now. Some in Europe are clearly starting to worry that this time there could be consequences. Jacques Barrot of France's majority party said last week he had no interest in policies that "uselessly destroy the relationship with the United States."
Hard as it is to get through the media filters, Europe's public and private leaders who agree with M. Barrot better start speaking up. If through constant cable-news coverage the American public has to consume enough of this guff, the next iteration of U.S. foreign policy may indeed not be close to the willing-coalition internationalism of Messrs. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. The next time the "global community" gets itself caught in the wringer and cries Uncle, the U.S. public may decide to let their critics swim to shore on their own.
This has nothing to do with the prospect of a neo-isolationist backlash, because in an economically and electronically entangled world isolationism is no longer possible. But it is to catch a glimpse of the funk and resentment into which relentlessly mindless anti-Americanism may pitch public sentiment in the U.S.
It takes a special kind of obtuseness to reject the proven inventory of the Iraqi threat or to ask, as a columnist for Britain's Independent newspaper did last week, "When is the U.S. going to get over the events of 11 September?" War indeed has its costs, but so too does free-riding political rhetoric.
Here's a very American thought for our critics. A few weeks ago, the great country-and-western singer Johnny Paycheck died. Johnny Paycheck's most famous song was "Take This Job and Shove It." After sacrificing more men and women to rid the world of Saddam Hussein's biological, chemical and nuclear weapons industry, the people of the United States may well decide that constantly bailing out an ungrateful world is a job they too can shove. If that ever happens, the world that results may not be so pretty. Tony Blair and José María Aznar aren't the only serious people in Europe who know this. There are others, and in the interest of multilateralism, they should let America see that they know it too.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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