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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (50051)	10/7/2002 5:38:17 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The Bush response only aggravates the problem By William Pfaff The International Herald Tribune Monday, October 7, 2002 iht.com Anti-Americanism in Europe Paris - A good deal of printer's ink has been spent debating anti-Americanism during the last year, both in and out of the United States. The latest instance followed Germany's parliamentary election at the end of September, when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's party coalition won a narrow victory, credited by analysts to his stand against German participation in any American attack on Iraq. The German chancellor's lèse-majesté provoked outrage in the Bush administration and warnings in American neoconservative circles that it will be 50 years before Germany will have recovered the trust of the United States, and thereby once again become an important state. In fact, from the European side of the Atlantic, it seemed that Schröder's stand added to Germany's international authority. Germany previously having tended to be seen as a satellite of Washington's rather than a nation with convictions of its own. Since a majority in German public opinion already opposed an attack on Iraq, and Schröder merely profited from supporting the majority, it is a surprise that the Germans have not been given the same propaganda treatment the French got a few months ago, attacked in U.S. neoconservative circles as an anti-Semitic society because of popular French pro-Palestinian sympathies. Official Washington has perhaps realized that the United States needs U.S. bases in Germany, but Germany does not. They are essential to the U.S. global strategic position. The subject of anti-Americanism can, however, be intelligently discussed, an example being a recent exchange between a French writer with a long record of sympathy for the United States, Jean-François Revel, and a younger colleague with family connections to the United States and a British education, Emmanuel Todd. Todd maintains that the United States today actually is displaying weakness. He says, "I have always had a positive vision of the United States" and "taken for granted that it was a reasonable power" but now "I have the sense of a disquieting semi-bellicosity, an agitation, a feverishness." He puts this down to an unarticulated sense of vulnerability in the United States, caused by its budget dependence on European and Japanese investment and its lingering strategic anxiety about Russia and China. He argues that current American emphasis on military and diplomatic action against weak rogue states is a kind of unacknowledged compensation for this anxiety. Thus embargoes are imposed on countries incapable of defending themselves, and tribal armies and "disarmed civil populations" are subjected to high-tech bombardment. He presumably has Serbia in mind. Revel answers that blaming America has always been a reflex of European intellectuals. He says that American politicians are given to hyperbole that should not be taken too seriously, and that Europeans have only themselves to blame for today's American predominance, since Europe's own failures in the 20th century made a gift of global power to the United States. He also says that the French themselves would be obsessed with terrorism if suicide planes had simultaneously attacked the Opéra, the Arc de Triomphe, and other prominent Paris sites - although he himself mentions the series of attacks on crowded Paris stores and train and metro stations in 1995, which were met without panic. It strikes me that the two are actually discussing two separate kinds of anti-Americanism. The old kind, which Revel stoutly opposed, was influential some thirty years ago, when news of the Gulag was only belatedly being admitted by a French intelligentsia traditionally disposed to uncritical support for the left. Then, every American Cold War measure was attacked as if it were an unprovoked provocation to the Soviet Union. The new kind of anti-Americanism is the one Todd talks about, and is a reaction to the post-Sept. 11 policies of the Bush administration, which he takes as revealing deep-seated anxieties in American society which have economic and demographic structural causes - a fragile economy, and loss of the old sense of national identity. He also argues that Washington's preoccupation with the rogue states and China - actually a weak state - and its concern that they might become allies with Russia, avoids looking at the real strategic threat, which is that a nuclear Russia would ally itself with the two most important real power centers outside the United States, which are Europe and Japan. This analysis is not one that seems to concern Washington, which makes much of the symptoms of anti-Americanism in Europe while actually making the problem worse. Chancellor Schröder did not whip up anti-Americanism in Germany. It was there already. That is what should worry Washington. ____________________________________________________ International Herald Tribune Los Angeles Times Syndicate International iht.com

To: JohnM who wrote (50051)	10/7/2002 6:35:17 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

A piece from "Reason" about Bush as we run up to his speech tonight. October 7, 2002 Editors' Links Bush's Winning Streak By Nick Gillespie At 8 p.m. Eastern time, President George W. Bush takes to the air waves from Cincinnati's Union Terminal to make the case for congressional authorization of military action against Iraq. Given that the terminal, rehabbed a dozen years ago into a popular museum complex, still houses Porkopolis's Amtrak depot, the setting for tonight's talk sends the wrong message about the efficacy and sagacity of government action. Yet as President Bush readies himself to deliver one of the very most momentous speeches of his presidency, at least two things are worth pondering. First, although Bush came to office under circumstances stormier than Hurricane Lili, even his harshest critics now recognize that the former governor and selectively amnesiac drunk driver is nothing short of a master politician. Perhaps the best early indication of this, other than the legal and public-opinion thicket he navigated to take office in the first place, was his phenomenally successful passing of a reputedly "impossible" tax cut in 2001. More recently, his speech to the U.N. on Iraq was widely, and rightly, seen as rhetorically brilliant, in that it used that group's own rationale as a predicate for action against Iraq. In a similar turn, Bush's resolution uses language essentially approved by Democratic senators back in 1998. It may not take an Einstein to make Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) look like a horse's ass, but it does take a savvy politician to do so with such brutal efficiency. No wonder that even The Nation, which won't have a good thing to say about the 43rd president until after he's been dead and buried for a decade, has removed its hoo-larious parody of Bush as Alfred E. Neuman from its home page. Second, there is virtually nothing Bush can say tonight that will alter the views of most of his supporters and detractors. Part of this is because both camps are well-ensconced in their positions and it's unlikely that Bush will reveal any new evidence that might resolve lingering questions about Iraq's ties to 9/11 and Al Qaeda. (If such links were proven, all but the most pacifistic doves would agree that military action against Iraq would be warranted.) Part of this is because Bush, fearing the difficult "Why now?" query, is unlikely to sever the warrant for invading Iraq from 9/11 (even though arguments that might win additional supporters have been made along these lines; see here and here, for instance). Bush has managed to put Iraq at the center of the national agenda as the fall elections loom larger. There was nothing inevitable or obvious about that in the wake of 9/11. (Indeed, as the CIA reported shortly after the attacks, there was no clear evidence linking Saddam Hussein to them.) He has even managed to bring most Americans along with him. As a new CBS/New York Times poll finds, two-thirds of Americans support military action against Iraq. That they do is a reflection of Bush's mastery of politics. But similar percentages also want to give weapons inspections more time, want the president to get a clear congressional mandate, and want Congress to ask more questions before signing on to war. It will be as much a testament to Bush's political skills if he follows the people on this one. reason.com