I made a short comment on the NYT article that you noticed. Now Cori Dauber at "Ranting Profs" does a Fisk. Glad to see he picked up on the same things.
JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE PARANOID DOESN'T MEAN THEY AREN'T OUT TO GET YOU
A piece on the front page of the Times' Week in Review section suggets that part of the problem we have with the rest of the world right now is that, unlike the Cold War, which provided a lens for viewing international relations and events that the whole world shared, the rest of the world just doesn't see the War on Terror as the overriding threat we do.
Important point.
Of course, the headline ("An Obsession the World Doesn't Share") by using the world "obsession," normally applied to inappropriate levels of focus, implies that those of our critics who charge that we are just trying to create a global "climate of fear" and that they're too smart to fall for it are in fact correct. In point of fact it may well be the case that the raging priorities some of these other countries have, which the writer helpfully starts the piece by listing, may well be the top priorities for those countries, far off the beaten path of the GWOT and not particularly central to it. (Are we really pressuring South Africa to put the GWOT front and center to our relationship? What inappropriate pressure have we put on Brazil?) But that hardly means that our focus on it is inappropriate.
And if Africa just doesn't see what all the fuss is all about, for Europe to think it's all a big obsession is their mistake, not ours.
So, where's the writer going with all this?
This situation has its paradoxes: the Bush administration's policies toward Latin America have been generally pragmatic and restrained.
Trade differences with Brazil, once acute over steel, have been quietly patched up, although Brazil's push to fight subsidies to farmers in rich countries continues. Mr. da Silva and Mr. Bush get along well, two straight-talking guys who like to brush past details, not least the fact that they come from opposing political camps. In theory, this could be a time marked more by harmony than hostility.
A similar situation prevails in South Africa. The United States is pouring more money into tackling the AIDS epidemic than any other country. Mr. Bush has made this fight a priority of his administration.
The personal relations between Mr. Bush and Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, are good. The African Growth and Opportunity Act, strongly supported by Mr. Bush, has provided important new trade openings by removing tariffs in several sectors, including automobiles.
Yet the president is routinely dismissed in the South African press as the Texas Twit and gets no credit for any of the policies that are helping the country or Africa as a whole. Dr. Jendayi E. Frazer, the American ambassador to South Africa, said that government-to-government relations were excellent, but that the prevailing atmosphere meant that "people who support the United States cannot come out and say it."
Excellent. Part of me wants to say, "oh, and of course this too is our fault." But the other part of me thinks, here's more fall out from our inability to produce a damn strategic communications policy.
For example, the writer continues:
Here lies part of the price of the war on terror, and particularly the war in Iraq, for the United States and Mr. Bush: the good done quietly on other fronts gains scant recognition because war against a constant terrorist threat is seen to be the overriding message from the administration.
Of course, there's a certain irony in not getting credit for the good we're doing because we're doing it while fighting a war of self-defense (the larger GWOT), as if the war in Iraq simply wipes away every other argument and every other truth. And the war in Iraq, of course, is seen as apparently beyond debate.
But if this writer's perceptions of the international zeitgeist is accurate, we've got a lot of ground to make up:
If Condoleezza Rice, nominated by Mr. Bush to be the next secretary of state, is to change this negative impression, she may have to concede that the war on terror is not, like the cold war, a label for an era. It describes the focus of America, a new principle and project guiding national policy, but it describes no more than that, because other countries have other agendas. What these countries want, above all, is to sense that the Bush administration, in its second term, hears them.
That's unacceptable, because it puts us in the position of fighting on behalf of the international community not only without any aid or assistance from the rest of the community but without an acknowledgement from them that a fight is justified. Without that the kinds of trade-offs and decisions justified in a fight (for example, getting the Europeans to accept arrest warrents across borders) won't be forthcoming. This simply is not a solely American fight. To treat it as if it is leaves us in a far more vulnerable position regarding the kinds of perceptions this writer is concerned about.
After all, since 9/11, the targets have been Brits in Turkey, Aussies in Indonesia, Indonesians in Indonesia, Phillipinos, Westerners in Saudi, Arabs in Saudi, Germans in Morroco, Morrocans in Morroco, Israelis in Africa (thus suggesting that perhaps Africa does have a dog in this hunt after all), Spaniards in Spain, and those are just the ones I can rattle off off the top of my head and the ones I can remember in a few seconds.
Yeah. Real American exclusivity.
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