Did you miss this?
Running through the Pew survey is the explicit assumption that it had been better for America before the "unilateralism," and our campaign in Iraq: We called up this anti-Americanism. But leave the false empiricism of these numbers, and there is nothing new in Amman, and Cairo, and Paris. No one said good things about America in Egypt in the 1990s, either. It was then that the Islamists of Egypt had taken to the road, to Hamburg and Kandahar, to hatch a monstrous conspiracy against the U.S. And it was then, during our fabled stock market run, when globalizers were celebrating the triumph of our economic model over the protected versions in places like France, when anti-Americanism became the uncontested ideology of French public life. We were barbarous, a threat to their cuisine, to their language. Our pension funds were acquiring their assets. We executed too many criminals. All this during a decade when we were told that we were loved abroad.
Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for America in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, and of the speed with which America presumably squandered that sympathy. Much has been made of that editorial in Le Monde, "Nous Sommes Tous Americains" -- We Are All Americans -- penned after Sept. 11. But it took the paper precious little time to revoke the sympathy it had expressed on Sept. 12. To maintain France's sympathy, and that of Le Monde, we would have had to turn the other cheek to al Qaeda, and engage the Muslim world in some high civilizational dialogue. Anti-Americanism flatters France, and gives its unwanted Muslims a claim on the political life of a country that knows not what to do with them.
Funny. I thought Slick Willie and his willie were Prexy during the '90s. |
