Sorry, Dale, but the only ones here claiming to speak for "world opinion" are Lizzie and her fellow Bush-haters. Frankly, little in that poll surprised me, especially the strong French opposition to economic opportunity, freedom of speech and democratic institutions. ;-)
But seriously, when you word every question (look at the cultural and economic questions) to essentially ask "Is America better than your country at _____?", I'd expect most people in the countries polled to say "No way!" I bet you'd get very similar results if the poll were retaken with "France" in place of "America".
The only thing that surprised me much was the degree of anti-Americanism in the numbers from Brazil, especially considering Brazil tied Israel for highest percentage of respondents who said they'd like to live in America. They'd like to live here, but less than 50% said they'd describe Americans as "free."
But over all, I'd say this poll says more about a lack of understanding about Americans and America than, as you suggest, our lack of understanding of them.
This poll also says NOTHING about CHANGES in attitudes toward the US, Dale, as you also suggest. This appears to be a one-time poll, so there is nothing to compare it to in order to draw conclusions about changes in attitudes, and it asks no questions about changes in attitude.
On the issue of the "world view" of Bush, the poll only asks one direct question about him - a "general attitude" question, answers to which are easily swayed by media portrayal - no one remotely objective would describe world media as balanced or objective on that.
But when you get down to specifics, to policies, you get a different picture. The only policy question you could reasonably relate to what you describe as "what has happened to the US image in the past year" (presumably meaning Bush's national and international security policies) is the one on terrorism. Asked whether they agree or disagree with US policies on terrorism, "agree" got a net +9% over "disagree" in the polled countries and even a net +13% in France.
As for the other two security-related questions, the Israel/Palestine question is pretty much meaningless as even Israelis gave us a negative rating and on the nuclear proliferation question, I doubt many respondents even understood what they were being asked to agree or disagree with. Except in France and Russia, perhaps - the key sources of technology and engineering for nuclear proliferation.
The Aids question, OTOH, does reflect a current issue where Bush has taken real action and world opinion, based on this poll, appears quite favorable. Of course, France and Russia are anti-American here as everywhere. And the big negative number here comes from Jordan - I hesitate to think what Arab media says about Aids.
Lastly, the whole "military" section of the poll is best described as a series of loaded questions - pun intended. I'm surprised they were only able to get 56% of those polled to say the US was "wrong" to invade Iraq. From the claims the Bush-haters make, one would expect that number to be at least 75%, if not 90+. Hell, for that matter, one should expect the numbers from the US to show the 74% figure under "wrong" instead of "right." |
