Where else could they have achieved freedom, progress and even prosperity?
But today, the American model no longer glitters as before. For a number of reasons, itS armor has been tarnished, its power feared instead of admired. A tear emerges from the right eye of the Statue of Liberty. Maybe it all started when suicide Muslim commandos rammed three planes into the Twin Towers of New York and the Pentagon in Washington last September 11, 2001. The shock, the terror, the fear was something America had never experienced. Three thousand died in that aerial holocaust. Never invaded, always protected from the outside world by two massive oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Americans realized they were now vulnerable.
It was also the first time they realized America was hated, otherwise why did the terrorists take all the trouble to destroy the two greatest symbols of America’s might? Why kill about 3000 innocent civilians? At that time, they could easily pinpoint the source of that hatred – extremist Muslims led by a misty eyed, drip-jawed fanatic Osama bin Laden. He was dedicated to the proposition that the best America was a devastated and prostrate America, only three words were writ on his coat-of-arms: Kill, kill, kill.
While the world of Islam did not exactly rally to his monomaniacal fury, it did not denounce him as a criminal and a scoundrel. In fact, tens of thousands of Muslims all over the world demonstrated in praise of his ideology and his deeds. And posters of Bin Laden spread in such profusion at one time he was the most recognizable face in the world. If the world of an angry Islam needed a hero, there he was, Osama bin Laden. History is notorious in this regard. Adolf Hitler too was known the world over, admired and even hero-worshipped by his partisans even as he butchered six millions Jews in the gas furnaces of Dachau and Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.
What followed, as all of America united in grief and uncommon courage and resolution, was America’s war on international terrorism.
This, I believe, was the tripwire that altered the official face of America or at the very least America as the world started to perceive it. There wasn’t much shock and consternation in the beginning as President George W. Bush climbed the bully pulpit to war on terror. Then the world heard a voice it was not used to hearing. It was a commanding voice, an imperious voice, a crackling voice. Also a frightening Manichean voice, that divided the world into good and evil. Those who took up America’s war against terror were good. Those who didn’t were evil. "If you are not for us, you are against us."
Nobody could be neutral. Terrorism was so evil everybody had to be against it.
Except that the world was not so constructed politically, religiously and ideologically. Islam was not that evil, certainly not the nations of Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan enrolled in America’s war and so did a small number of Arab countries like Yemen and Kuwait. But even these distinctions were eventually glossed over.
What probably got the goat of Europe, the Old World that fathered Amerca, was another America, emerging like a genie from a bottle. This was the America that withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, that refused to join and even campaigned against the new International Criminal Court. It withdrew from Kyoto because America’s massive consumption of gas and pollution agents would reach such heights as to earn it official retribution and punishment. It withdrew from the Court because America did not want its soldiers and intelligence agents, who violate or might have violated international law, to be arrested and indicted by the Criminal Court.
At best, these were major irritants. But irritants just the same.
What really provoked European anger and international outrage to a certain extent was George W. Bush new and frightening doctrine of "preventive war". America could militarily strike at or even annihilate any country it strongly suspected of possessing weapons of mass destruction. The rationale was that America had a right to defend itself against future 9/11s. Therefore it did not have to wait until a rogue country armed with WMDs struck the US. Why wait? Why not slit the throat of that country before it moved to destroy America with bacteriological, chemical, radiological and perhaps nuclear weapons?
Thus the present but briefly temporary stalemate on Iraq.
The overwhelming majority of the world’s nations, including the United Nations Security Council, have lined up against the war. The US has repeatedly warned it would invade Iraq with a "coalition of the willing" and the UN could go – well – hang. This is where we are, the world against, the US poised at any moment to rain death and destruction on Iraq.
Yesterday in the wake of 9/11, there was fulsome praise for America. Today, as Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser of President Jimmy Carter, stated: "The cross Atlantic vitriol is unprecedented. There is disarray even among close allies and worldwide public opposition to the war." New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, formerly an unabashed Bush admirer, now says: "It’s legitimate for the Bush folks to focus on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, but two years of gratuitous bullying has made many people deaf to America’s arguments."
Across the Pacific, Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad told the Non-Aligned conference in Kuala Lumpur an American attack on Iraq "will simply anger Muslims who see this as anti-Muslim rather than anti-terror."
The week before, for three consecutive days, as the International Herald Tribune reported, "millions of chanting, placard-waving demonstrators converged on cities around the world over the weekend in a global chain of protests against the Bush" administration’s threatened war on Iraq." Even in Britain, whose Prime Minister Tony Blair fully supports George Bush, tens of thousands of Londoners stormed into the streets to "vote with their feet" against the US.
Why does America now find itself almost alone?
George W. Bush is one answer. His critics look at his face and they see a menacing Panzer full of gun turrets. Bush is consumed with passion, consumed with war "because I am a leader and leaders make decisions for their people" whatever anybody says. A changing America, that anyway is the perception, has become a big international bully. It listens only to itself. And yet the America before 9/11 still felt the vibrations of the Bell of Liberty in Philadelphia, still lit the upraised face of the Statue of Liberty. And it stood proud as these words were intoned: "Bring me your poor, your hungry, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
The word terror, the shadow world of terrorism, the fear of future 9/11s, the feeling of vulnerability, have so wounded and scarred America. So its leadership in a knee-jerk reaction would now seek to scare or bully the world with the awesome might of its military power, its economy, its industry which can manufacture more than the rest of the world combined. This is what many Europeans – who owe so much to the earlier munificence and benevolence of America – fear.
Part of the hate, of course, arises from jealousy. The Islamic world, for instance, envies America its modernity, its ingenuity, its technology, its bigness, its capacity to project US power anywhere in the world. The poor nations suffer a huge dose of "inferiority complex." They survive only because the massive American market is there, and this gives them a feeling of cultural helplessness, of drift and even defeatism.
But it is the European reaction that swishes like a Toledo blade. For they are brothers, Europeans and Americans. They are cut from the same cultural, religious and political cloth. The Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the blood of many European wars, the broth of many revolutions, brewed by Karl Marx, the French philosophers of the Enlightenment, the Jacobins, the haughty rebel head of Oliver Cromwell, the immortal lines of Shakespeare forged modern Europe as it did America.
This is the deeper meaning of 9/11, and it will take the world a long time to absorb it. When brothers fight, sword slashes land on the cheeks.