The Time When It Mattered The Most

To me, it all comes back to 2004.

I know you remember; Martha Stewart went to the slam, the tsunami hit Southeast Asia, “The Scream” was stolen from the Munch Museum in Norway (was it ever found?), and The Sainted Ronnie R shed his mortal coil and immediately ascended into an afterlife that (as some believe) likely represented the back lot of the Warner Brothers film studio (with our corporate media waxing ad nauseum about his “optimism”).

And oh yeah, we had that presidential election in November (and that’s a whole other flood of recollections that you remember as well as I do, including the idiot in the picture making fun of John Kerry's Purple Heart citation).

This is real “department of the obvious” stuff I know, but I’m recalling this as a pretext for this letter that appeared in the New York Times last Friday which was actually written in response to an editorial on the five-year anniversary of the Iraq war (though it could easily be written in response to an editorial about our 4,000th casualty, any new revelations about “extraordinary rendition” as well as the “surge” – you name it)…

In my conversations with a number of people outside the United States, what seemed most appalling to them was not the killings, torture or illegal detentions nor was it the complete callousness of the current administration.

Indeed, what appalled them most was the fact the country re-elected this president in 2004 and that neither the press nor the electorate is willing to hold anyone culpable for what has to be the most egregious human rights violations by any democratic government in history.

What has tarnished our image more is not what we did in Iraq but that we appear to care so little about it. I am sorry to say that editorials and letters to the editor won’t help in changing that perception.

Sukumar Vijayaraghavan
Denver, March 20, 2008

To get a better idea of how the results of that election have tarnished our image abroad, I want to present this excerpt from a column in The New Yorker by Hendrik Hertzberg; this was actually written last December, but I didn’t feel like I had a good opportunity to work it into a post until now (Hertzberg starts off by discussing Australia after John Howard was ousted from his PM post by Kevin Rudd)…

They don’t much like our President in the land Down Under. In the most recent poll by Australia’s Lowry Institute, huge majorities disapproved of American foreign policy in general (sixty-three percent) and George W. Bush in particular (sixty-nine percent). But similar majorities take a positive view of America (sixty percent) and Americans (seventy-six percent). The rest of the world, alas, is not so discriminating. According to Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes’s “America Against The World” (2006), based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project, there was a time, not so long ago, when foreigners “found it easy to say their problem with America was really President Bush, not a considered judgment of the American people. But the results of the 2004 U.S. presidential election made that rationalization untenable.” An avalanche of new international polls – from Pew, the German Marshall Fund, the BBC, and others – show that anti-Americanism has reached astronomical levels almost everywhere and has solidified even in the Northern European belt from Britain to Poland. “Countries that would once have supported American foreign policy on principle, simply out of solidarity or friendship, will now have to be cajoled, or paid, to join us,” Anne Applebaum, a conservative commentator not given to sentimentality about “World opinion,” wrote recently in the Washington Post. “Count that – along with the lives of soldiers and civilians, the dollars and equipment – as another cost of the war.”

I’ll cut Hertzberg some slack for quoting Applebaum, though she is definitely not a credible source of much of anything else; an example of her literary antics appears here (and Hertzberg recalls the so-called “Annapolis Summit” of late last year below).

Last week’s gathering of Israeli and (Sunni) Arab leaders at Annapolis was a sign that it has finally dawned on the Bush Administration that its six-year policy of ignoring the Israeli-Palestinian morass has aggravated American’s troubles in the Middle East. The President may at least have realized that while the issue is not the sole cause of Islamist extremism, it cannot continue to fester – for the sake not only of Israeli survival and justice for the Palestinians but also of beginning to restore some of the global influence and esteem this administration has squandered. But in suddenly capping six years of obtuse neglect with a one-year timeline, President Bush has probably dithered too long to have any hope of solving the world’s most complicated and persistent rebus. His late awakening is yet another cost of the Iraq war. Those costs keep mounting, and they’re not likely to abate until there’s regime change a little closer to home.

And as if to emphasize that, the New York Times tells us here today that Dubya intends to keep our Iraq troop levels intact; the war will of course be left as one of many messes to be cleaned up by his successor (seriously, though, did we doubt that?).

I want to end with this note about a friend of mine who told me of a Mediterranean cruise she took with her husband about a year ago with individuals of mixed nationalities. When the cruise line (don’t recall which one, and I wouldn’t want to mention them anyway) asked her if she had a preference for dinner seating with Americans only or other foreign nationals, she and her husband asked to be seated with foreigners. When the ship stopped at ports of call, they interacted pretty seamlessly with the foreigners, but when they were seated for dinner on the ship, they discovered that they were sitting only with Americans.

They asked the cruise director if there had been a mix up in their dinner seating arrangement, and the cruise director said no. It turns out that the individuals of other nationalities didn’t want to be seated with the Americans.

All because of 2004, people.