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

To: JohnM who wrote (67166)	1/20/2003 12:28:59 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Forgotten in all this is the very high levels of sympathy following 9-11, to the point of the NATO vote to consider it an attack on all NATO members. Bush's actions and policies since have waisted that moment. That's what these demonstrations are about. Very high, maybe, but also very temporary. As I recall, this burst of sympathy didn't last long enough to cover the Afhanistan campaign, by any measure directly connected to 9/11. Remember the cries of "humanitarian disaster", "cannot bomb in Ramadan", "quagmire", and the oldie-but-goodie, "the brutal Afghan winter"? The Taliban, it seems, was hateful, but not sufficiently hateful to support its removal by American troops. The anti-American streak is broad and wide. Rather than think that Bush wasted an extensive sympathy, I would say that a burst of sympathy silenced and covered over the deep well-springs of anti-Americanism in the European Left. But it didn't last long, nor was it reasonable to expect it to. I'm sure the manners of the Bush administration have exacerpated the anti-Americanism. A Democratic president more practiced in Euro-style hypocrisy could have been less grating (not that the Senate was ever going to ratify Kyoto under any circumstance). But the real philosophical differences remain, and would have come to the fore in the aftermath of the trauma of 9/11, no matter who was president.