by Barry Rubin
In Latin America, one rarely found such sentiments, but they were most evident in Brazil, where the eminent economist Celso Furtado termed the September ii attack a provocation by right-wing Americans to justify seizing power, as had the Nazis in Germany in 1933. The prominent theologian Leonardo Boff said he was sorry more planes hadn't crashed into the Pentagon. Even the country's president, the socialist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, told a cheering French parliament, "Barbarism is not only the cowardliness of terrorism but also the intolerance or the imposition of unilateral policies on a global scale." His audience knew who he was bashing. Cardoso, a French-educated veteran advocate of the view that the United States was responsible for Latin American underdevelopment, had also been frequently feted in America and received honorary degrees from Notre Dame and Rutgers universities. In a September 2001 poll, 79 percent of Brazilians opposed any military attack by the United States against countries that hosted those responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center, with higher levels of opposition among the wealthiest.76
Such ideas were heard even from Canada, America's northern neighbor, though Prime Minister Jean Chretien, in sharp contrast to many European statements, blamed the whole West generally for responsibility regarding the attack: "You cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others. That is what the Western world-not only the Americans, the Western world-has to realize.... I do think that the Western world is getting too rich in relation to the poor world and necessarily will be looked upon as being arrogant and self-satisfied, greedy and with no limits. The iith of September is an occasion for me to realize it even more.""
The fact that the attackers were mostly from well-off families and came, as did their political movement as a whole, from Saudi Arabia, the Third World's richest country, did not seem to affect his judgment. Part of the problem was that the critics reinterpreted the attack as a symptom of whatever complaints they had about the United States and its policies. Blaming the United States for the attack and denying it the right to self-defense were unfriendly actions reflecting hostility rather than some deeper wisdom.
Since the September it attack clearly originated with Usama bin Ladin, the United States had every right to respond with military action against him and his cooperating host, the Taliban government in Afghanistan. To the anti-Americans, however, this was an act of aggression. The attribution of responsibility to bin Ladin was doubted, the domestic oppression caused by the Taliban was ignored, American motives were called into question, and the worst possible face was put on the conduct of the war.
When the Taliban did fall in December 2001, the French radio correspondents at the scene spent more time attacking the United States for behaving in an imperial way and accusing American journalists of collaborating in this effort. They explained that claims that Afghans did not support the Taliban regime were an example of American propaganda. One common motive for anti-Americanism, jealousy, was in full display as the French reporters bitterly complained that their American counterparts arrived "with pockets full of dollars," which enabled them to rent helicopters and hire the best interpreters."
Matters were somewhat different regarding the U.S. decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. Whether or not the attack was warranted, this was a policy that certainly did feed into anti-American preconceptions that had already become quite powerful. It could be said to show that the United States was too powerful, ignored others' wishes or interests, and appeared eager to attack foreign countries. But the infusion of a massive dose of anti-Americanism into the debate made the opposition more passionate and hostile, and interfered with efforts to find someway to avoid the crisis or increase international cooperation to deal with it.
Of course, even in the United States, the war was most controversial and condemned by many, sometimes in terms similar to those heard in Europe or the Middle East. Yet once any of the actual motives for the United States to confront Iraq were dismissed, it was easy for people in many countries to see themselves as the potential victim of America. In this sense, the invasion of Iraq, having nothing to do with any element of the misdeeds of Saddam Hussein's regime, came to be seen as a precedent for the future conquest of any other given country in the world.
The extreme response was to accuse the United States of engaging in an imperialist action to steal Iraqi oil as another step in its plan for world domination. Another theme was that this was an action against the Iraqi people, who were in fact suffering under perhaps the world's worst dictatorship. Ironically, one of the main accusations against the United States by anti-Americans had been that it was indifferent to the depredations of such regimes. Anti-American critics played down the Saddam Hussein regime's misdeeds, a tremendous irony for those portraying themselves as defenders of human rights and freedom. Throughout Europe, antiwar demonstrations turned into hate-America rallies. A study of the five main French newspapers' coverage of the Iraq War showed twenty-nine headlines condemning Saddam's dictatorship and 135 blaming Bush for the conflict.79
At times, whipping up hysteria-as opposed to disagreeing with U.S. policy in a constructive manner-was related to cynical partisan considerations. This approach was clearly true in the September 2002 German election. The victory of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who had been suffering during the campaign because of the country's poor economy, was probably due to his demagogic anti-American appeals. Among other things, Schroeder made a nationalist appeal by stating that to go along with the American policy would make Germany a puppet of the United States. His justice minister, Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, went so far as to compare Bush to Adolf Hitler, which in Germany was no mere rhetorical flourish.80
Indeed, Schroeder's German Social Democratic Party became a consistent sponsor of anti-Americanism. Ludwig Stiegler, a member of parliament, likened Bush to an imperialist Roman emperor bent on subjugating Germany. Oskar Lafontaine, the party's deputy co-chairman, called the United States "an aggressor nation." Rudolf Hartnung, chairman of the youth organization, accused the United States of "ideologically inspired genocide" in Central America and other places. State legislator Jurgen Busack claimed, "The warmongers and international arsonists do not govern in the Kremlin. They govern in Washington. The United States must lie, cheat, and deceive in an effort to thwart resistance to its insane foreign policy adventures."-
Anti-Americanism had become a coherent ideology, which seemed to have replaced Marxism as the left's dominant idea. The U.S. government, Tariq Ali explained, had long previously planned world domination and then "utilized the national trauma of September ii to pursue an audacious imperial agenda, of which the occupation of Iraq promises to be only the first step." Iraq was seized in order to profit from its oil assets and benefit Israel.82
More broadly, the goal was to intimidate the rest of the world so that it would be subservient to American orders. In Ali's summary, "Just as the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had once been a pointed demonstration of American might to the Soviet Union, so today a blitzkrieg rolling swiftly across Iraq would serve to show the world at large, and perhaps states in the Far East-China, North Korea, even Japan-in particular, that if the chips are down, the United States has, in the last resort, the means to enforce its will."-
The real goal, according to Ali, was a classically imperialist one: "The United States is now deciding it wants to run the world. The United States should come out openly and say to the world, `We are the only imperial power, and we're going to rule you, and if you don't like it you can lump it.' American imperialism has always been the imperialism that has been frightened of speaking its name. Now it's beginning to do so. In a way, it's better. We know where we kneel."84
There was also a seemingly less extreme, but roughly similar, antiAmerican version of events that had wider credibility. It began by saying that the United States was not a crazed, world-conquering nation but merely one with a bad government at the present time. But while Bush at first appears to be the target, the argument soon
moved into a blanket condemnation of U.S. policies over a very long period.
This approach was exemplified, for example, by the Guardian columnist George Monboit. The United States, he said, had no right to wage "war on another nation because that nation has defied international law." He charged the Bush administration with having "torn up more international treaties and disregarded more United Nations' conventions than the rest of the world has in 20 years." This list included the Bush administration's rejection of agreements on biological, chemical, and nuclear tests. But Monboit then went on to accuse the United States of illegal experimentation with biological weapons, assassinating foreign leaders, and torturing prisoners.81
While he was apparently just criticizing the Bush administration's specific policies, the article is entitled "The Logic of Empire," viewing this as the logical goal of American society. This is the classical antiAmericanism that views its imperialist drive as an inevitable outcome of its structure:
The United States also possesses a vast military-industrial complex that is in constant need of conflict in order to justify its staggeringly expensive existence. Perhaps more importantly than any of these factors, the hawks who control the White House perceive that perpetual war results in the perpetual demand for their services. And there is scarcely a better formula for perpetual war, with both terrorists and other Arab nations, than the invasion of Iraq. The hawks know that they will win, whoever loses. In other words, if the United States was not preparing to attack Iraq, it would be preparing to attack another nation. The United States will go to war with that country because it needs a country with which to go to war.86
Thus, the ostensible reasons for the war have nothing to do with it. The cause is a thirst for killing and conquest that America's survivaland the employment needs of certain individuals-require. This is a classic statement of anti-Americanism because it argues that the United States is integrally and inevitably evil. As a result, the people of France did not just oppose the war; many of them also hoped for a U.S. defeat. According to an April 2003 poll, 34 percent supported the U.S.-led forces, 25 percent wanted Iraq to win, and 31 percent declared themselves neu- tral.87
The key element in all this discussion was not so much opposition to the Iraq War based on the immediate issues but a generalized antagonism toward the United States. In the popular BBC radio show, Straw Poll, on July 26, 2002, Professor Mary Kaldor debated Washington Post reporter T. R. Reid on whether "American power is the power of the good." She argued that the U.S. role as the sole superpower was a danger to the rest of the world. At the end of the program, 70 percent of the studio audience said it agreed with her.88
When it came to the purer expressions of hatred, however, this was best expressed by literary figures who do not require even the most basic forms of alleged proof for their inflammatory claims. Harold Pinter, one of Britain's leading playwrights, put his view of the perpetually evil American into verse in "God Bless America, Here They Go Again." The war in Iraq is just one more example of "The Yanks in their armored parade," singing with joy "as they gallop across the big world/Praising America's God." The streets are full of bodies from those they have murdered, mutilated, brutalized, and massacred.89
America is thus prodded into mass murder by its fanatical religious beliefs that take joy in killing and destruction. Viewing Americans as a nation of religious nuts is as common among European anti-Americans as seeing the United States as a country of atheists who hate the deity is for Middle Eastern critics.
Arguing that the United States was wrong on any given issue was certainly a fair response, but often the point being made-and requiring major distortions of the facts-was that something intrinsically wrong with America caused the real or alleged shortcomings. It was blind, ignorant, and aggressive, driven by religious fanaticism and greedy imperialism. Perhaps most of all, it was different, not subject to the kinds of motives and ideas that shaped civilized Europe.
America was retaliating to terrorist attacks in Iraq because, according to an Italian writer, it was driven by the "Christian God of the army of the righteous" and was about to invade Iran mainly because it had the capability to do so.90 A colleague suggested that the U.S. goal in Iraq was "to show the UN and Europe that the control of the entire world is firmly in American hands."91
The British novelist John Le Carre engages in an only slightly more sophisticated frothing by seeing the United States both as a serial murderer as well as a society whose repression is on a plane with that of Saddam Hussein. It is an approach merging critiques of U.S. foreign policy and domestic society into one big imperialist package:
America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this [one is] ... worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant U.S. media and vested corporate inter ests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press....
But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election. The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. What is at stake is not an Axis of Evilbut oil, money and people's lives. Saddam's misfortune is to sit on the second biggest oilfield in the world. Bush wants it, and who helps him get it will receive a piece of the cake. And who doesn't, won't.
What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of U.S. growth. What is at stake is America's need to demonstrate its military power to all of us-to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.92
America, then, is a society that lies as systematically abroad as it does at home. Being struck by the largest single terrorist attack in world history has no bearing on its motives. Its very nature forces it into an imperialist role, the type of idea that would previously have been expressed only by doctrinaire Communists. The American media, which featured a massive discussion over every aspect of the U.S. response to September ii, including a heated debate over the prospective Iraq War, is merely a captive organ on the level of the Soviet press. The overwhelming conformity and lack of real freedom that nineteenth-century anti-Americans claimed characterized the United States are still mainstays of the critique. In short, the ignorance of America, a constant feature of anti-Americanism for two centuries, has not diminished among major groups of European intellectuals.
Indeed, bizarre interpretations of the American domestic scene were very much a factor in the anti-Americanism around the Iraq War. In England, an American journalist was asked on one show whether he saw "any parallels between the security state that George Bush has created in America since 9/11 and the Gulag." Another British interviewer asked whether people in America are often arrested for insulting the president on the Internet.93
Canada, located right next door to the United States, might be expected to have a better understanding of such things. Indeed, hostility there is lower and more reasoned. While 53 percent of Canadians held unfavorable attitudes toward the U.S. government in 2003, 70 percent thought favorably about Americans, while 62 percent had a very or somewhat favorable view of the United States.94
Yet, at the same time, Canada has a specific problem in regard to its ten-times-more-populated neighbor. Whatever the differences between the two countries, they are close enough in language, history, and customs that Canada must define itself as the "un-America" to have any identity at all. Canada's self-image is that of a kinder, gentler nation that is nice to people around the world, is environmentally conscious, and has a more sedate pace of life.
In a book published in 2003, Fire and Ice, Michael Adams assures his fellow citizens that the two countries were moving in opposite directions. Americans were becoming more socially conservative, fat, and deferential to authority figures. Meanwhile, Canadians were becoming more tolerant, open to risk, and willing to question the institutions that governed them.
In intellectual and media circles, however, Canadian attitudes toward the United States do not always display such high levels of tolerance. These are the groups that are on the front lines of defining Canada's difference from the United States, since, otherwise, they had no marginal advantage over their more powerful American competitors. Like European counterparts, they evince a great deal of fear, jealousy, and resentment. The Canadian novelist Margaret Drabble is typical of a large element of this group's opinions; she wrote in February 2003:
My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world. I have tried to control my anti-Americanism, remembering the many Americans that I know and respect, but I can't keep it down any longer. I detest Disneyfication, I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history. I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn't even win.95
In Australia, too, where the government supported U.S. policy on Iraq, the parliamentary debate revealed hatred and resentment far beyond this specific issue, as demonstrated by the title of a book by Richard Neville, Amerika Psycho: Behind Uncle Sam's Mask of Sanity. Such attitudes were amply demonstrated in parliamentary debates. Australians "are sick and tired of this government's compliance with every demand the United States makes," said Australian Member of Parliament Martin Ferguson. Fellow MP Julia Irwin complained, "In the empire of the United States of America, are we to be merely citizens of a vassal state ... not as a proud and independent nation but as a deputy sheriff to the United States; a mercenary force at the bidding of the president?" Leader of the Australian Labor Party and MP Mark Latham added, "Along with most Australians, I do not want a world in which one country has all the power." And Harry Quick remarked, "The dilemma facing the world is that America has a caricature of a Wild West gun-toting Texas bounty hunter masquerading as a U.S. president and desperate for a rerun of the Gulf War."96
