Another 9/11 Myth – Squandered Goodwill
With a hat tip to James Taranto, it’s time to bust the myth that we had all this store of goodwill built up because of what Muslim terrorists did to us on 9/11, but Bush squandered it when he went to war. From the London Telegraph, Anne Applebaum writes:
But it’s also true that this initial wave of goodwill hardly outlasted the news cycle. Within a couple of days a Guardian columnist wrote of the “unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world’s population”. A Daily Mail columnist denounced the “self-sought imperial role” of the United States, which he said had “made it enemies of every sort across the globe”.
That week’s edition of Question Time featured a sustained attack on Phil Lader, the former US ambassador to Britain – and a man who had lost colleagues in the World Trade Centre – who seemed near to tears as he was asked questions about the “millions and millions of people around the world despising the American nation”. At least some Britons, like many other Europeans, were already secretly or openly pleased by the 9/11 attacks.
And all of this was before Afghanistan, before Tony Blair was tainted by his friendship with George Bush, and before anyone knew the word “neo-con”, let alone felt the need to claim not to be one.
There was outpouring of sympathy, to be sure. But to confuse that with some sort of policy shift is just wrong.
The dislike of America, the hatred for what it was believed to stand for – capitalism, globalisation, militarism, Zionism, Hollywood or McDonald’s, depending on your point of view – was well entrenched. To put it differently, the scorn now widely felt in Britain and across Europe for America’s “war on terrorism” actually preceded the “war on terrorism” itself. It was already there on September 12 and 13, right out in the open for everyone to see.
And really, was the breaking of the UN sanctions by the likes of France and Russia really a result mostly–even partially–of some sort of lost love for the US? Please. It was selfish interest, plain and simple, by economies that couldn’t handle the loss of a trading partner very well.
Anne does note that American may have turned folks off with our “go it alone” mentality (although a coalition of 20 groups in Afghanistan and a few dozen that have or had participated in Iraq doesn’t sound too much like we’ve “spurned traditional alliances”), but faults Europe as well for already being “disinclined for their own reasons to sympathise with any American tragedy”.
Frankly, Democrats are blaming Bush for losing something we never really had.
Technorati Tags: Anne Applebaum, goodwill, anti-Americanism
Filed under: Culture • Foreign Policy • Politics
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There is a lot of Anti-Americanism in Europe, but let’s not exaggerate it.
If there was a lack of solidarity, why did NATO invoke Article V for the first time and why is Sarah Kreps, who was in the Air Force from 1999-2003, holding a roundtable discussion at the American Institute of Contemporary German Studies today to discuss this question: “With overwhelming levels of international support, and numerous offers for operational assistance, why did the U.S. undertake the Afghanistan intervention almost entirely unilaterally?”
Don’t forget Applebaum also said “While not entirely incorrect, the notion that President Bush has wasted international post-9/11 sympathy is not entirely accurate either.” So it is complicated and ambigious and I tried to address that in
To Defeat the Beast, Don’t Feed the Beast, which is a quote from Germany’s ex-Foreign Minister Fischer, who is now teaching at Princeton. He does not blame America for terrorism, but for making the conflicts worse due to policy mistakes. I think we can all agree that Europe and the United States need to increase all their efforts in the war on terrorism and have to choose the right and hard and painful rather than the wrong and easy and appeasing way to deal with the threats.
The implication of Ms. Kreps question–what it appears to assume–is that if we’d just given more countries a piece of the action in Afghanistan, there wouldn’t be as much a problem with solidarity with the US. I don’t think that’s a valid assumption to make.
I certainly understand the issue about policy decisions making terrorism worse, but then I’m not sure that was entirely preventable. Did the United States make the conflict worse by entering the European theater in World War II? Definitely! If we hadn’t shown up, the fighting and would certainly have diminished. Of course, France and Poland may have looked a bit different today, perhaps spoken a different language, but at least the conflicts would certainly have been quelled. But which would you rather have?
It does appear that you’re not entirely anti-war, that you know that we are indeed in a war, but the quotes from your book in the linked review are rather short on specifics. You suggest that Iraq has become a place for terrorists to send their experts, that they’re using the war as a recruiting tool. But, again, I could say the same about Germany (sending their experts to the front lines with America, using the American invasion of France as a recruitment tool) or Japan (experts to the Pacific, recruitment).
Any such pushback is likely to increase the violence and give the enemy something to exploit for increasing their numbers. I don’t see that this means that we shouldn’t push back or that such pushing is automatically a policy blunder.
I admit, all I really have to go on in understanding your position are the few quotes from your book in the review you linked to, so I’m sure there’s much I’m missing from your complete position. I’m just working from the information on the page you pointed out.