Why
the world loves to hate America
Moisés Naím
The
writer is editor of Foreign Policy magazine
Financial Times, December 6 2001
19:17
A First Step
Wall Street Journal 2001-12-12
This week the European Union has finally seen fit to acknowledge the fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization and has called on Yasser Arafat to "dismantle" his terrorist networks and arrest the terrorists.
This recognition of the facts of life and death in the Middle East has been a long time coming. But it is a significant shift in attitude towards the problems of Israel, one that accompanies a hardening up of George Bush's policy toward Arafat.
7
war scenarios every investor must consider
Suppose the war drags on.
Suppose we capture bin Laden tomorrow.
For every what-if in the war on
terrorism, there's a different outcome for investors.
CNBC
2001-11-02
America and the War
By Tony Judt
The
New York Review of Books November 15, 2001
"America is solidly organized egoism, it is evil made systematic and regular." Osama bin Laden? No, Pierre Buchez, a French socialist writing in the 1840s. Anti-Americanism goes back a long way. It was not born of American global domination-when Edmond de Goncourt wanted to express his horror at Baron Haussmann's new Paris he observed that "it makes me think of some American Babylon of the future."
That was in 1860, when the US was still at best a regional power. Much has changed since then, though America is still seen in many quarters as the embodiment of rootlessness, disruption, cosmopolitanism: modernity, in short. But if the US is to make sense of its place in the world, if the present war is to have any beneficial long-term outcome, Americans need to make a sustained effort to understand what it is that so many millions of foreigners claim to dislike and fear about their country.
In the present mood, this subject elicits little serious discussion. Some on the left, whether in the US or Europe, have slipped comfortably back into familiar routines: peace vigils, teach-ins, and finger-pointing. The real problem, it sometimes seems, is not terrorists but the American government. "They" (George Bush, the Establishment) will use the crisis as an excuse to trample on our civil liberties-for Terry Eagleton, writing in the London Review of Books, the US is already "a one-party state."
And as for the horror of September 11, some just can't help feeling that, as the historian Mary Beard put it, "however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming."
Professor Thomas Laqueur of Berkeley writes that "on the scale of evil the New York bombings are sadly not so extraordinary and our government has been responsible for many that are probably worse."
Frederic Jameson of Duke University argues that "the Americans created bin Laden during the Cold War.... This is therefore a textbook example of dialectical reversal." We devised the world's problems-imperialism, exploitation, globalization-so we shouldn't be surprised at the backlash
This war has made me a conservative
By Stephen Pollard
Daily
Telegraph 2001-10-28
But all things are not, of course, equal. Mr Marsden may be no more substantial a figure than he was a week ago, but he represents something important. He represents the opinions which most of his colleagues on the Labour benches are unwilling to make public.
A critical part of that mindset is a profound loathing of the United States. There are, of course, exceptions. Peter Shore, whose recent death robbed the party of one its few genuine Atlanticists, enraged his party in 1980 when, as shadow foreign secretary, he supported the US boycott of the Moscow Olympics. And for many years George Robertson, now the Secretary General of Nato, fought a lonely battle to convince his colleagues that America was overwhelmingly a force for good.
But the attitude of most Labour MPs is very different. Just as, during the Cold War, most of them felt that there was not much to choose between the two superpowers, so today the party has identified another bogus “moral equivalence”.
Since September 11, whenever I have made clear my disgust at the attitude of most of my fellow Labour Party members, the reaction has usually been to attack me as a “closet Tory”. So close an identity is there between being on the Left and hating America that any support - even after she has just lost thousands of people in a terrorist attack - is, of itself, seen as evidence of being on the other side of the political divide.
It’s an accusation I have long had to put up with. Until September 11, I have always treated it with derision. Now I am not so sure. Last week I dined with a group of Left-wing friends, one a prominent Labour backbencher, another a senior minister. Out came the familiar stuff: killing thousands of people is terrible but if America had not been such a malign presence in the world it would never have happened; bin Laden may be an evil criminal but he speaks for large numbers of the dispossessed. Blah blah blah. We’ve heard it all before, we’ve read it all before.
But the unpleasant truth for someone like me, who has spent his entire adult life on the Left, is that such reactions are not restricted to a few Guardian readers: they are shared by Labour MPs, ministers and almost everyone I know on the Left. I feel like Norman Podhoretz’s definition of a neo-conservative: a liberal mugged by reality.
There is, it seems, a fundamental divide in this world between those with instincts on the side of freedom and decency - and prepared to defend it - and those who live in a different moral universe. What else can explain the grotesque, shameful remarks of Peter Hain, the Foreign Office minister, on Thursday? According to Mr Hain, “We are just as horrified as Arab leaders and Arab peoples about the atrocities in the occupied areas - and indeed in Israel . . .. We deplore all terrorist attacks, whether suicide bombs in Tel Aviv or terrorist acts in the occupied areas.”
This war is not about terror, it’s about Islam
By David
Selbourne
Daily Telegraph 2001-10-07
David Selbourne is author of
The
Principle of Duty: An Essay on the Foundations of the Civic Order
The war of the hour, we are told, is against “global terrorism”. So declared President Bush in his speech to Congress on September 20 and Tony Blair in his oration to his Party Conference last week. It is nothing of the sort.
The Soviet Union was once the evil empire challenging the West. Now it is the resurgence, or insurgency, of Islam that looms over the non-Islamic world. The momentum of the Islamic revival has been gathering pace at least since the 1950s. Yet the West’s justified fear of this resurgence and a desire to avoid offence to the Islamic faith have had our leaders treading on eggshells over the events of September 11.
Now Do We Get Serious on Oil?
By Robert J.
Samuelson
Washington Post, October 11, 2001
If politics is the art of the possible, then things ought to be possible now that weren't before Sept. 11. Or perhaps not. For three decades, Americans have only haphazardly tried to fortify themselves against a catastrophic cutoff of oil from the Middle East, which accounts for about a third of world production and two-thirds of known reserves. Little seems to have changed in the past month, although the terrorism highlighted our vulnerability. Oil is barely part of the discussion.
Over the past 30 years, we have suffered Middle East supply disruptions caused by the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979 and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. We have fought one war for access to oil -- the Persian Gulf War. How many times do we have to be hit before we pay attention?
No one can foresee what might lead to a huge supply shutdown or whether the present attack on Afghanistan might trigger disastrous changes. A collapse of the Saudi regime? A change in its policy? Massive sabotage of pipelines? Another Arab-Israeli war? Take your pick.
Even if we avoid trouble now, the threat will remain. In 2000 the United States imported 53 percent of its oil; almost a quarter of that came from the Persian Gulf.
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