To some, America got what it had coming

By Richard Boudreaux | Foreign Corrspondent
Posted September 16, 2001

ROME -- There is no shortage of reasons in much of the world to dislike the United States. From European capitals to the coca fields of South America and the assembly lines of Southeast Asia, many see America as arrogant and selfishly fixated on its own politics and interests.

Its unparalleled power makes it a lightning rod for a host of grievances brought by allies, adversaries and outright enemies.

Ghoulish scenes of Palestinians dancing and rejoicing over Tuesday's mass slaughter in New York and Washington are only the most extreme and recent public expression of anti-Americanism -- or at least a wariness of American power -- that has followed the United States' rise as a superpower, through conflicts in the Cold War and since.

Beneath the sorrow and dismay voiced abroad this week over the deadly attacks on American cities is an undercurrent of rebuke from critics who hope that the devastation will temper the superpower's sense that it can dictate to everyone else. For much of the world, America's grief is also its comeuppance.

"People are really deeply shocked by the doomsday-like pictures," said Mirjana Bobic, a popular author and head of cultural programming on Serbian state television in Yugoslavia. "But you know, every stick has two ends, and, if you are beating others, you should expect a boomerang effect."

"It's like shock therapy for the United States, not to be too arrogant," said Bagus Prasetyo, 23, who works for South Korean carmaker Hyundai in Jakarta, Indonesia.

While there may be ample reasons to dislike the United States, the nation remains a source of admiration and a magnet for immigrants from around the world -- criticized more for bullying and doublee standards than for its way of life.

Few U.S. enemies possess the ideology and motivation to stage suicide hijackings like the ones that sent airliners crashing into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Hatred for the United States, Israel's strongest ally, has risen to a fever pitch among many Palestinians and throughout the Islamic and Arab world over the past year of Israeli-Palestinian fighting.

Yet anti-American sentiment is far broader and appears to have intensified after President Bush, after taking office in January, opposed a draft treaty on global warming and revived an unpopular U.S. proposal for a Star Wars-like missile shield.

Bush was a focus for protest this summer when more than 100,000 demonstrators besieged a Group of 8 summit in Genoa, Italy, to rail against a model for the global economy that they say neglects the poor and harms the environment. The Bush administration provoked an outcry at the U.N. Anti-Racism Conference in Durban, South Africa, this month when its delegation walked out, protesting bias against Israel.

"There are lots of degrees of anti-Americanism, but it would be dangerous to lump them all together," said Sergio Romano, a former Italian ambassador to Moscow. "There are growing divergences between the United States and other countries, but many who are critical of America would never dream of resorting to what we saw Tuesday."

The danger, he and other commentators say, is that Americans will perceive a uniformly hostile world and push their own leaders toward unilateral action or inward toward isolationism.

Former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti expressed such a fear in the Italy's Senate on Wednesday. "As we voice our solidarity with the anguish of the United States, we must make it clear that it should avoid the kind of indiscriminate action that it has taken in the past that only makes things worse," he said.

The warning from Moscow was much harsher.

"U.S. foreign policy has been characterized by a high degree of self-confidence, complacency and intoxication with its own power following the Cold War," Vladimir Lukin, a deputy speaker of the Russian Parliament and a former ambassador to Washington, said in an interview.

"If the U.S. prefers to pretend that it rules the world, such myopia will continue to result in horrible acts of terror," he added.

In Beijing, the People's Daily advised Bush to take the disaster as "a serious warning" against "hegemonist foreign policies."

American arrogance, in the view of many, is rooted in part in its status as a relative newcomer as a superpower.

China's 5,000 years of history and advanced civilization are sources of pride to its leaders and citizens. The idea that the country has been eclipsed and often hectored and lectured by such a young know-it-all is galling, like a veteran worker taking orders from a squeaky new boss, a reversal of the reverence for age that marks Chinese Confusian thinking.

Likewise, many Arabs and Muslims view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as far older than the Americans perceive it.

To them, the conflict is a continuum of centuries of Western meddling. They think that the West, which today is America, declared war on Islam with the first Crusade -- a Christian holy war more than 1,000 years ago. They see the establishment of Israel as the United States' insertion of Jews into the region, another step of Western conquest.

Richard Boundreaux is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.

Copyright © 2001, Orlando Sentinel