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| Is the US Winning 'The War on Terror'? |
| Yes |
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35% |
[ 6 ] |
| No |
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52% |
[ 9 ] |
| Unsure - Please explain why you are unsure |
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11% |
[ 2 ] |
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| Total Votes : 17 |
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| Author |
Message |
Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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 Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2005 3:31 am Post subject: |
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| some waygug-in wrote: |
I think a lot of you people are fooling yourselves if you think the war in Iraq is going to "prevent" future terrorist attacks in America. If anything, it��s going to create a mindset to plan more and more 9/11 style attacks.
You can bet that if and when the next one happens, a lot of people will be a lot less sympathetic towards America. They will be saying, serves you right. You brought it on yourselves.
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There wasn't much sympathy for the US after 9-11 either. That it did was a cliche.
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WE WERE ALL AMERICANS
The introduction of the Pew report sets the tone for the entire study. The war in Iraq, it argues,"has widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans" and "further inflamed the Muslim world." The implications are clear: The United States was better off before Bush's "unilateralism." The United States, in its hubris, summoned up this anti-Americanism. Those are the political usages of this new survey.
But these sentiments have long prevailed in Jordan, Egypt, and France. During the 1990s, no one said good things about the United States in Egypt. It was then that the Islamist children of Egypt took to the road, to Hamburg and Kandahar, to hatch a horrific conspiracy against the United States. And it was in the 1990s, during the fabled stock market run, when the prophets of globalization preached the triumph of the U.S. economic model over the protected versions of the market in places such as France, when anti-Americanism became the uncontested ideology of French public life. Americans were barbarous, a threat to French cuisine and their beloved language. U.S. pension funds were acquiring their assets and Wall Street speculators were raiding their savings. The United States incarcerated far too many people and executed too many criminals. All these views thrived during a decade when Americans are now told they were loved and uncontested on foreign shores.
Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied by the famous editorial of Le Monde's publisher Jean-Marie Colombani, "Nous Sommes Tous Américains" ("We are all Americans"). And much has been made of the speed with which the United States presumably squandered that sympathy in the months that followed. But even Colombani's column, written on so searing a day, was not the unalloyed message of sympathy suggested by the title. Even on that very day, Colombani wrote of the United States reaping the whirlwind of its "cynicism"; he recycled the hackneyed charge that Osama bin Laden had been created and nurtured by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Colombani quickly retracted what little sympathy he had expressed when, in December of 2001, he was back with an open letter to "our American friends" and soon thereafter with a short book, Tous Américains? le monde après le 11 septembre 2001 (All Americans? The World After September 11, 2001). By now the sympathy had drained, and the tone was one of belligerent judgment and disapproval. There was nothing to admire in Colombani's United States, which had run roughshod in the world and had been indifferent to the rule of law. Colombani described the U.S. republic as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise, its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police cruel to its black population. A republic of this sort could not in good conscience undertake a campaign against Islamism. One can't, Colombani writes, battle the Taliban while trying to introduce prayers in one's own schools; one can't strive to reform Saudi Arabia while refusing to teach Darwinism in the schools of the Bible Belt; and one can't denounce the demands of the sharia (Islamic law) while refusing to outlaw the death penalty. Doubtless, he adds, the United States can't do battle with the Taliban before doing battle against the bigotry that ravages the depths of the United States itself. The United States had not squandered Colombani's sympathy; he never had that sympathy in the first place.
Colombani was hardly alone in the French intellectual class in his enmity toward the United States. On November 3, 2001, in Le Monde, the writer and pundit Jean Baudrillard permitted himself a thought of stunning cynicism. He saw the perpetrators of September 11 acting out his own dreams and the dreams of others like him. He gave those attacks a sort of universal warrant: "How we have dreamt of this event," he wrote, "how all the world without exception dreamt of this event, for no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of a power that has become hegemonic . . . . It is they who acted, but we who wanted the deed." Casting caution and false sympathy aside, Baudrillard saw the terrible attacks on the United States as an "object of desire." The terrorists had been able to draw on a "deep complicity," knowing perfectly well that they were acting out the hidden yearnings of others oppressed by the United States' order and power. To him, morality of the U.S. variety is a sham, and the terrorism directed against it is a legitimate response to the inequities of "globalization."
In his country's intellectual landscape, Baudrillard was no loner. A struggle had raged throughout the 1990s, pitting U.S.-led globalization (with its low government expenditures, a "cheap" and merciless Wall Street-Treasury Department axis keen on greater discipline in the market, and relatively long working hours on the part of labor) against France's protectionist political economy. The primacy the United States assigned to liberty waged a pitched battle against the French commitment to equity.
To maintain France's sympathy, and that of Le Monde, the United States would have had to turn the other cheek to the murderers of al Qaeda, spare the Taliban, and engage the Muslim world in some high civilizational dialogue. But who needs high approval ratings in Marseille? Envy of U.S. power, and of the United States' universalism, is the ruling passion of French intellectual life. It is not "mostly Bush" that turned France against the United States. The former Socialist foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, was given to the same anti-Americanism that moves his successor, the bombastic and vain Dominique de Villepin. It was Védrine, it should be recalled, who in the late 1990s had dubbed the United States a "hyperpower." He had done so before the war on terrorism, before the war on Iraq. He had done it against the background of an international order more concerned with economics and markets than with military power. In contrast to his successor, Védrine at least had the honesty to acknowledge that there was nothing unusual about the way the United States wielded its power abroad, or about France's response to that primacy. France, too, he observed, might have been equally overbearing if it possessed the United States' weight and assets.
His successor gave France's resentment highly moral claims. Villepin appeared evasive, at one point, on whether he wished to see a U.S. or an Iraqi victory in the standoff between Saddam Hussein's regime and the United States. Anti-Americanism indulges France's fantasy of past greatness and splendor |
http://www.travelbrochuregraphics.com/extra/the_falseness_of_antiamericanism.htm |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2005 6:49 am Post subject: ... |
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| The United States need not worry about hearts and minds in foreign lands. |
That fits US "diplomacy" for the past 4 years.
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| If Germans wish to use anti-Americanism to absolve themselves and their parents of the great crimes of World War II, they will do it regardless of what the United States says and does. |
At this point, even "parents" is a stretch. Note the sudden switch from France.
AND, in terms of blame, guilt, and wrongdoing, it's suddenly being compared to the Nazis.
Joo, you yourself don't want Nazism invoked in regard to Bush. But you think invoking Nazism to write off contemporary Germans is OK?
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| If Muslims truly believe that their long winter of decline is the fault of the United States, no campaign of public diplomacy shall deliver them from that incoherence. |
I wouldn't pin everything on America, but the fact stands.
There was a democratic Iran in 1953. The US decided it didn't suit their interests. Why? Because of oil.
Now we want democracy. We are extremely hypocritical in this respect.
Without US involvement, Iran was not on track to have a Khomeni.
You refuse to acknowledge this. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2005 6:57 am Post subject: Re: ... |
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| The United States need not worry about hearts and minds in foreign lands |
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| That fits US "diplomacy" for the past 4 years. |
That is cause the US is going to be resented no matter what.
That fits US "diplomacy" for the past 4 years.
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At this point, even "parents" is a stretch. Note the sudden switch from France.
AND, in terms of blame, guilt, and wrongdoing, it's suddenly being compared to the Nazis.
Joo, you yourself don't want Nazism invoked in regard to Bush. But you think invoking Nazism to write off contemporary Germans is OK? |
I think the author is talking about what is behind much of Germanys' anti Americanism. IF that is their motive should he not allude to it?
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| If Muslims truly believe that their long winter of decline is the fault of the United States, no campaign of public diplomacy shall deliver them from that incoherence. |
I wouldn't pin everything on America, but the fact stands.
There was a democratic Iran in 1953. The US decided it didn't suit their interests. Why? Because of oil.
Now we want democracy. We are extremely hypocritical in this respect.
Without US involvement, Iran was not on track to have a Khomeni.
You refuse to acknowledge this.[/quote]
Of course the US was wrong then , on the other hand it was more complicated than that. and the US had a short time ago helped them get the Russians out. |
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Alias
Joined: 24 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2005 7:09 am Post subject: |
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The top US military commander in the Middle East warned yesterday that troops are questioning whether the American public supports the Iraq war and implored political leaders to engage in a frank discussion about how to keep the country behind a mission that the armed forces believe is ''a war worth fighting."
Army General John Abizaid said that without that support, the military's ability to prevail against Iraqi insurgents and Islamic extremists will be at serious risk.
''When I look back here, at what I see is happening in Washington, within the Beltway, I've never seen the lack of [public] confidence greater," Abizaid told the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he testified along with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Air Force General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army General George Casey, the commander of coalition troops in Iraq. The group also appeared before the House Armed Services Committee.
''I can tell you that when my soldiers ask me the question whether or not they've got support from the American people . . . that worries me," Abizaid told senators. ''And they're starting to do that. And when the people that we're training, Iraqis and Afghans, start asking me whether or not we have the staying power to stick with them, that worries me, too."
He warned lawmakers that ''American soldiers can't win the war without your support, and without the support of our people."
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US General Says Troops Question Support |
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