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How to make friends and influence people
USA Today, which until recently I only knew as McPaper, turns out to have some surprisingly good articles sometimes. I ran across this one, Global warmth for US after 9/11 turns to frost, a couple days ago. The article notes the growing dislike of America and American policies worldwide, and asks why has there been such a growth of anti-american sentiment. Some of the answers they found:
What happened, many Americans are wondering, to that wave of sympathy and stockpile of global goodwill they encountered after Sept. 11?
"It was squandered," says Meghnad Desai ... "America dissipated the goodwill out of its arrogance and incompetence. A lot of people who would never ever have considered themselves anti-American are now very distressed with the United States," he says.
Desai and others blame what seems to be a wave of new U.S. policies that they regard as selfish and unilateral, stretching back to President Bush's refusal last year to support the international treaty on global warming.
Many are enraged by Bush's support for steel tariffs and farm subsidies, his refusal to involve the United States in the new international criminal court and what is widely regarded abroad as one-sided support for Israel and its prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
The rash of corporate malfeasance and blanket arrest of terrorism suspects after Sept. 11 further fuels critics, who say the United States preaches democracy, human rights and free enterprise — but doesn't practice them.
The Council on Foreign Relations ... issued a biting report warning the Bush administration that it urgently needs to upgrade its efforts at public diplomacy to counteract the country's "shaky" image abroad... "Around the world, from Western Europe to the Far East, many see the United States as arrogant, hypocritical, self-absorbed, self-indulgent and contemptuous of others," Peterson says. "This is not a Muslim country issue. It has metastasized to the rest of the world and includes some of our closest European allies."
Quite an indictment, and there is a lot more in the article that I didn't excerpt. I think a lot of it comes down to the Bush administration's frequently expressed view that they don't really care what anybody else thinks, because they know what is right. People like people in power to at least pretend they care what the other people think, especially when the person in power is capable of causing vast changes in their life. When the world's only superpower claims it that has the right to go into any country and do whatever it wants in the name of "The War on Terrorism", that it doesn't really need its allies, and that it plans to ignores multilateral institutions, people are fearful. It is like living next door to the proverbial 800 lb. gorilla. Who knows what it will do next?
I fear for the time when America needs other countries' assistance. Bush is sowing bitter seeds that America will be reaping for a long time.
Tip o the hat to The War in Context, which does an excellent job of pointing to other countries' media coverage of the war.
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