Nice to see that not everyone overseas is an Obamapologist.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/david_aaronovitch/article4374704.ece
It amuses me that some of those who criticise the present US Administration for its Manichaeism – its division of the world into good and evil – themselves allocate all past badness to Bush and all prospective goodness to Obama. As the ever-improving myth has it, on the morning of September 12, 2001, George W. and America enjoyed the sympathy of the world. This comradeship was destroyed, in a uniquely cavalier (or should we say cowboyish) fashion, through the belligerence, the carelessness, the ideological fixity and the rapacity of that amorphous and useful category of American flawed thinker, the neoconservative. They just threw it away.
But there isn’t anything that can’t be fixed with a sprinkling of genuine fairy dust. What Bush lost, Obama can find. Where the Texan swaggered, the Chicagoan can glide. Emotional literacy will replace flat iteration, persuasion will supplant force as the preferred means of achieving what needs to be achieved, empathy will trump narcissism. Those who hate America may find their antipathy waning, those who were alarmed by unilateralism will warm to softer, moral leadership. A new dawn will break, will it not?
“Anti-Americanism” seems to be oh-so-popular these days… and has been for as long as I can remember. 9-11, despite claims to the contrary, was not a shining moment for the US/George Bush to get the world to love us… on that day, much of the world *did* love us. We were bruised, bleeding and in pain. That took us down a peg and made us lovable. But as soon as we picked outselves up and laid a beatdown on the Taliban, the love began to fade… and the moment that we went into Iraq and ended the decade-long charade, the hate came out in force. But what has the US done to deserve hate? Objectively… not that much. The same sort of people who bitch that the US should not have gone into Iraq are very often the same ones who bitch that the US waited far too long to go to war against Nazi Germany. Of course, in 1939 when Britain and France were staring at the Wermacht and Luftwaffe, the US was an economically trashed second rate power on the other side of the planet, with no real ability to project power. But in 2003, the US was – and remains – the only nation with both the ability and will to project power. And the fact that the US occasionally projects power in the interested of the US irritates the hell out of some people. So, all of a sudden we’re imperialists (though we don’t control Iraq, and the most common complaint about Afghanistan is that we don’t devote enough attention and power to the region), which is magically a bad thing for Europeans, who have spent the last 2000 years stacking one empire atop another. Somehow we’re Fascists, although the explanation for that one has always been pretty damned vague. We’re vulgar, stupid, evil, and every other negative descriptor you can come up with. But at the same time, actual dictatorships, from Putin to Chavez, from China to Iran, get a pass. Why is this?
The answer is really pretty easy: it is easy to hate the US because… we’re *not* evil. If some British tabloid, say, screams anti-American drivel day after day, we’re not going to firebomb their offices. We are not going to burn down foreign embassies because one of their newspapers posted an anti-American cartoon or because their leaders called us names in a speech. We are not going to muck around with international trade in a fit of pique. We’re not going to invade and conquer nations on a whim.
Anti-Americanism is the safest thing in the world, inside the US and out. There is precisely zero courage required to get up and shout “Down with America.” No political bravery is required in the US to loudly proclaim that Bush is a moron, that our troops are immoral monsters or misled dumbasses, that American corporations are evil monstrocities out to destroy the world. Actors, musicians and others in the entertainment industry who stand on stage and bitch about neocons are not being daring… they’re simply playing to expectations. A Hollywood executive who green-lights a movie about American exceptionalism, and which takes a positive view of, say, Republicans and American efforts in Iraq *would* be demonstrating a bit of backbone.
That Obama is the darling of media both home and abroad should not be a surprise. He promises a return to policies of the past… namely, the Carter era. An era with the US in serious decline, militarily and economically. An era of Americans being depressed about the price of oil, the state of the evonvironment and economy, the threat of powerful foreign enemies and ascendant Islamofascism. Obama promises to repeat all the failures of the Carter administration; but he’s promising these failures with a smile. If you dislike the US…. what’s not to like about Obama?
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