[Off Topic] LOST LOVE: The Decline of America's Reputation Since 9/11/2001

September 11, 2006

[An editorial by Hendrik Hertzberg, one of the best editorial

columnists working in the United States. This one appeared in the

New Yorker, issue of September 11, 2006. Sorry to stray off topic,

by I thought it was an appropriate dose of clear-eyed truth on a day

that's bound to be filled with misty sentiment:]

After the calamity that glided down upon us out of a clear blue sky

on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001 — five short years

ago, five long years ago — a single source of solace emerged amid

the dread and grief: a great upwelling of simple solidarity.

Here in New York, and in similarly bereaved Washington, that

solidarity took homely forms. Strangers connected as friends;

volunteers appeared from everywhere; political and civic leaders of

all parties and persuasions stood together, united in sorrow and

defiance. In certain regions of the country, New York had been

regarded (and resented) as somehow not quite part of America; that

conceit, not shared by the terrorists, vanished in the fire and dust

of the Twin Towers.

The reconciliation was mutual. In SoHo and the Upper West Side, in

the Village and the Bronx, sidewalk crowds cheered every flag-

bedecked fire engine, and the Stars and Stripes sprouted from

apartment windows all over town. New York, always suspect as the

nation's polyglot-plutocratic portal, was now its battered, bloody

shield.

The wider counterpart to our traumatized togetherness at home was an

astonishing burst abroad of what can only be called pro-Americanism.

Messages of solidarity and indignation came from Libya and Syria as

well as from Germany and Israel; flowers and funeral wreaths piled

up in front of American Embassies from London to Beijing; flags flew

at half-staff across Europe; in Iran, a candlelight vigil expressed

sympathy. "Any remnants of neutrality thinking, of our traditional

balancing act, have gone out of the window now," a Swedish political

scientist told Reuters. "There has not been the faintest shadow of

doubt, not a trace of hesitation of where we stand, nowhere in

Sweden."

Le Monde's front-page editorial was headlined NOUS SOMMES TOUS

AMÉRICAINS, and Italy's Corriere della Sera echoed, "We are all

Americans. The distance from the United States no longer exists

because we, our values, are also in the crosshairs of evil minds."

In Brussels, the ambassadors of the nineteen members of NATO

invoked, for the first time in the alliance's fifty-two-year

history, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, affirming that "an

armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America

shall be considered an attack against them all" and pledging

action, "including the use of armed force."

No one realistically expected that the mood of fellow-feeling and

coöperation would long persist in the extraordinarily powerful form

it took in the immediate wake of September 11th. The normal

divisions of American politics and society were bound to make

themselves felt again, and whatever the United States did in

response to the attacks would provoke the tensions and

misunderstandings that inevitably accompany the actions of a

superpower in distress, no matter how deft its diplomacy or thorough

its consultations.

But it was natural to hope that domestic divisions would prove less

rancorous in the face of the common danger, and that international

frictions could be minimized in a struggle against what almost every

responsible leader in the world recognized, or claimed to recognize,

as an assault on civilization itself.

What few expected was how comprehensively that initial spirit would

be ruined by the policies and the behavior of our government,

culminating in, though hardly limited to, the disastrous occupation

of Iraq.

This shouldn't have been so surprising. George W. Bush campaigned in

2000 as a "compassionate conservative," one who recognized that

government was not the enemy, praised bipartisanship, proclaimed his

intention to "change the tone in Washington," and advocated a

foreign policy of humility and respect. None of that happened. Nine

months into his Presidency, an economic policy of transferring the

budget surplus to the wealthy, a social policy hewing to the demands

of the Christianist far right, and a foreign policy marked by

contempt for international instruments (the Kyoto protocol, the anti-

ballistic-missile treaty) and the abandonment of diplomatic

responsibilities (the negotiations over North Korea's nuclear

activities, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate) had pushed Bush's job

ratings lower than those of any of his predecessors at a like point

in their tenures.

September 11th offered him a chance for a new beginning, and at

first he seemed willing to seize it. Although the war against Al

Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan was not as widely backed at

first as is often assumed (particularly among many on the European

left and some on the American), it is now almost universally

supported in the Western world, with some forty countries involved

and NATO troops carrying an increasing share of the military burden.

But then came a reversion to form, and Iraq.

In "America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are

Disliked," based on ninety-one thousand interviews conducted in

fifty nations from 2002 to 2005 by the Pew Research Center, Andrew

Kohut and Bruce Stokes write that while "the first hints that the

world was becoming troubled by America came soon after the election

of George W. Bush," and that "whatever global goodwill the United

States had in the wake of the September 11 attacks appears to have

quickly dissipated," after the Iraq invasion "favorable opinions had

more than slipped. They had plummeted."

It's grown worse since May, when the book was published. The most

recent Pew findings show that "favorable opinions of the U.S." have

gone from eighty-three per cent in 2000 to fifty-six per cent in

2006 in Britain, seventy-eight to thirty-seven in Germany, and sixty-

two to thirty-nine in France.

The majorities saying that the Iraq war has made the world more

dangerous are equally impressive: sixty per cent in Britain, sixty-

six in Germany, and seventy-six in France. On this point, the United

States is catching up. The most recent CNN poll, taken in late

August, found fifty-five per cent of Americans saying that the Iraq

war has made them less safe from terrorism.

Last week, the Administration launched a new public-relations

campaign aimed at marketing the war in Iraq as the indispensable key

to the struggle against terrorism. The Vice-President and the

Secretary of Defense gave speeches attacking the war's opponents (a

category that includes, if that same CNN poll is to be believed,

sixty-one per cent of the American public) as the contemporary

counterparts of the appeasers of Nazism.

President Bush, as one of his contributions to the P.R. campaign,

granted an interview to Brian Williams, of NBC. As the two men,

shirtsleeved in the sun, strolled together down a bleak New Orleans

street, Williams wondered if the President shouldn't "have asked for

some sort of sacrifice after 9/11." Bush's reply:

"Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot

of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy

went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel

was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this

nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed."

And so we have. Not by paying "a lot of taxes," of course; we pay

less of those than we did before, and the very, very richest among

us pay much, much less. But we have sacrificed, God knows. "The

military occupation in Iraq is consuming practically the entire

defense budget and stretching the Army to its operational limits,"

John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration and

a member of the 9/11 Commission, wrote in the Washington Post a

couple of days after Bush's interview. "This is understood quite

clearly by both our friends and our enemies, and as a result, our

ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating." That's

a sacrifice.

And here's another: our country's reputation.

SOURCE: The New Yorker

URL:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060911ta_talk_hertzber

g

September 11, 2006

Thanks for sending this, D.B. I have been sitting in my apartment all this Monday, listening to helicopters and planes circling in the skies above my city. Mr. Bush and his cronies were here. The Mayor is patting his own back over the wonderfulness of our city pulling itself together. And tomorrow? A Democratic Primary election -- may they pick candidates that can drive the Republican fat cats out at last.

Sorry. Too political. I'll shut up now.

-- Len

Devi Bhakta <devi_bhakta > wrote: [An editorial by Hendrik Hertzberg, one of the best editorial