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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (11173)	5/27/2004 4:54:10 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 20773

On European streets: America the unloved Richard Reeves United Press Syndicate Thursday, May 27, 2004 On European streets PARIS Preparing for a series of interviews with foreign leaders several years ago, I told my editor I was not sure I knew the right questions. "Don't worry about it," he said. "Just ask them what they think of us. That's all Americans care about." Now an American has to be a masochist to ask that question in Europe. The worst I heard this time was listening to a live interview with Italians who were asked about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's recent visit to Washington, and his statement that he was there as "America's best friend." "He's not America's best friend," said a professor from Rome. "He's George Bush's best friend - and that's not the same thing." A trio of young marketing executives, speaking good English, were asked the the same question. The first two said they loved America and hated what America was doing around the world. Fair enough. The third, a woman, said: "You think we'd know better. This has happened to us before. Mussolini wanted to be the best friend of the most powerful man in the world 70 years ago - and look what that did to us." I had just come from London, America's closest ally in the war against terror and the disastrous war of choice against Iraq. President George W. Bush's real foreign best friend, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, seems on the verge of losing his job. Privately, it is said, he believes that "The Coalition" - the American and British forces that invaded Iraq - has only about 100 days to make the world believe that they did the right and bright thing. Or what? Private life. For him. And probably for his friend Bush as well. The latest Sunday Times poll in England indicates that just about half of voting respondents believe Blair should quit now. More than 90 percent responded that he is "damaged" by his alliance with the Americans, with more than two-thirds of them saying "hugely damaged." Only 23 percent said they believed Britain should remain a "wholehearted" ally of the Americans. More damaging, perhaps, in a newspaper that supported a British role in Bush's war, The Times' cartoonist, Gerald Scarfe, shows a booted Bush mockingly pointing toward a naked Blair's private parts. "Prisoner of War Forced to Humiliate Himself" is the caption. "There is a pattern here," begins the lead editorial of the paper once called The Thunderer. "Mr. Blair has made no public criticism of America's postwar strategy in Iraq. He has been mealy-mouthed in his criticism of U.S. prisoner abuses. "We have always argued that to call the prime minister Mr. Bush's poodle was silly. In the past few weeks Mr. Blair has been doing his best to prove us wrong." Here in France, the American whose ideas and actions are most covered and admired, it seems, is not Bush but the filmmaker Michael Moore. His anti-Bush film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," was the talk not only of the annual film festival in Cannes, where it won the top prize, the Palme d'Or, but in all the rest of the country, too. The Cannes audience for the premiere stood and applauded for 19 minutes as the film ended. His goal, Moore responded, was not applause but the defeat of Bush. Then he added this: "Soldiers have written me to express their disillusionment with the war. It's a case of our own troops not being in support of their commander in chief." Those troops, I suspect, are going to be the real American losers in the Iraq war, as their fathers who served in Vietnam were the ones punished after that war of bad choice. Politicians and filmakers move on to new audiences. The quote that sticks with me from European coverage was not by anyone you've ever heard of; it came from a 24-year-old lieutenent from South Carolina, Erik Illif, who said: "We wonder what people back home think of us. Will it be like Vietnam, where everyone who fought there is labeled a baby killer?" Well, if young women on the streets of Rome are comparing America's president to Hitler, they probably are going to see other Americans as brutes and thugs who ignored the obvious at home and unthinkingly followed orders in dehumanizing prisons and other symbols of military occupation far from home. United Press Syndicate iht.com

To: Rambi who wrote (11173)	5/28/2004 5:29:29 PM
From: Michelino	Respond to of 20773

The aberration in the alliance began on this side of the Atlantic and we must repair here it in November. That article is just more of the same thumb-sucking xenophobic rationalization for the messianic objectives of the neo-cons. For example "At a very basic level, much of Europe fails to appreciate the seriousness of the core principles animating American foreign policy" is nonsense. Instead Europeans appreciate the cartoonish definitions of morality and reject with open eyes the hypocritical underpinnings of the Bush chicken hawks. The best refutation of ludicrous examples of newspeak such as "the current administration emphasis on pragmatism and frank speaking has a certain cultural appeal to many Americans" or "neocons...ideas have a fair degree of approval within the ranks of the Democratic Party as well" is seen in the summation of Al Gore's recent momentous speech. Neo-cons continue to mock Al for his emotion (any outrage but their own MUST always be condemned as manic) but his words offer an alternative view to Selden's marketing of the neocon disgrace as the next stage in our manifest destiny "So today, I want to speak on behalf of those Americans who feel that President Bush has betrayed our nation's trust, those who are horrified at what has been done in our name, and all those who want the rest of the world to know that we Americans see the abuses that occurred in the prisons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and secret locations as yet undisclosed as completely out of keeping with the character and basic nature of the American people and at odds with the principles on which America stands. " Europeans will have fewer "known unknowns" and other neo-cons myths to ponder once the Bush nightmare is over and repudiated at the polls