As Bush administration officials hash out strategies for prosecuting their declared war on international terrorism, critics of U.S. foreign policy are pushing for a parallel and sweeping debate on America’s actions abroad.
The critics, at home and elsewhere, are mostly keeping their voices down. They do not want to be seen as blaming the victim of the deadliest terrorist attack in history. They are not trying to justify the deaths of more than 6,000 people in New York and the Washington area at the hands of political fanatics.
Most of all, they do not suggest that the United States craft its foreign policies to the likes of Osama bin Laden or the hijackers of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But they say the United States must not ignore the unsettling way many people around the globe reacted–from outbreaks of glee in some Arab lands to a kind of grim satisfaction even in nations that America considers its strongest allies.
“The thug got beat up,” Slava Mironenko, a Moscow metalworker, said in a comment not atypical in Russia and many other countries. More than a fifth of respondents in a recent Russian opinion poll expressed satisfaction over the attacks, lining up behind the statement: “The United States had gotten the punishment it deserved.”
If bin Laden’s views are easy to dismiss, how about those of the Mironenkos of the world? Critics say U.S. policymakers must drop their defense that the nation is merely misunderstood, envied more for its wealth and power than resented for anything it actually does in the world.
Especially now, as the U.S. ponders military action in response to the terrorist attacks, America is being urged to examine why it inspires so much antipathy, and not just over its policies on Israel, the Palestinians and Iraq.
“America, the victim country, has much work to do even as it decides on its course of action, which will of necessity have to be tough,” said Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a columnist for the Independent in London who has criticized U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.
“Only with . . . universal self-examination can we move toward a global civilization,” said Alibhai-Brown, urging Palestinians, Israelis and European nations to look in the mirror as well.
“We share your grief, America–totally. But you must share our concerns.”
Alibhai-Brown was a guest on a BBC panel show that outraged some viewers who accused the British network of loading the audience with anti-Americans. After the show aired in the week after the terrorist attacks, hundreds of complaints flooded the BBC phones and Web site.
While denying that it stacked the deck, the BBC apologized.
The controversy showed that even outside the U.S., critics of American policies are vulnerable to charges of being insensitive to the loss of life or even sympathetic to the terrorists who took those lives.
In Berlin, for example, German prosecutors said Monday that they were considering charging protesters with slander for chanting at a recent peace rally: “USA–international center for genocide.”
Such attitudes could limit the debate not only about how the U.S. should counter terrorism. It also could squelch questions about how Washington might adapt a foreign policy that critics, and even some allies, say can be unilateralist and even bullying.
Ronald Asmus, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, said this internal debate would in fact be part of America’s response to the attacks.
“If you listen carefully, people already are saying: Look, we too have to reflect and review and look at our policy,” said Asmus, who was a deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration.
“We have to try to understand why this sense of hatred and rage is out there and what we can do to deal with it.
“But we also have to understand that we may just get to the point where we have to draw the line and decide that our policies are right and that we have to fight for them,” Asmus said. “You’re going to have a big debate that will take years. This is just the beginning.”
Critics say they have seen little evidence of this.
President Bush’s speech to Congress and to the nation recently was roundly praised as providing just the message America wanted to hear after the terrorist attacks.
But many people abroad wanted something different.
From Bush they wanted a hint of introspection, if not humility.
“The president essentially touched on all possible eventualities, except one,” said Sergei Rogov, who directs the Institute for the U.S. and Canadian Studies in Moscow.
“Absent from his speech was recognition of America’s own mistakes.”
