It's hard to convey how different it is, watching America from the outside. For 22 years, I
lived in
America , grew up with CNN, and it's fair to say that, of course, I now carry an
American perspective.
Seeing that perspective challenged while living abroad has
been a wake up call to say the least. Americans
seem to believe that their country is seen as the world's best place to live. Everyone wants to be American, right? We are so lucky to live in
America, right? Not exactly, I think.
Particularly in the past year,
America's image as a beautiful, peace-loving, enlightened place has been tarnished.
America is not seen as a 'beacon of hope' for most people in the world any longer -- it is seen as a place to be feared.
"It's not safe in
America," people in
Japan often tell me. "Everyone has
guns, for one thing, and the terrorists could always attack at any time. Plus, the Americans now have no problem with being aggressive with their
terribly powerful military.
America is powerful and scary. The people
are nice, it's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." I'm off to visit
America next month. "Be careful,"
everyone says. That's the new
image of
America.
For people with brown skin around the world,
America is even more fearful now. "The
FBI will watch us. Some American guy
might think I'm a friend of Osama bin Laden and kill me. We could never be welcome in
America . It's too dangerous." That's the new image of
America .
And it didn't have to be this way. On
September 12, 2001
, just about everyone in the world saw a humbled hero when they looked toward
America . Everyone was willing to be our
friend, was willing to stand with us. The
actions of the Bush administration since that time quickly changed
America's image. Ironically, now is
perhaps the most important time for
America to be humble and to be seen as a temperate power -- not an overaggressive
warmonger.
Bush's decision to risk everything in order to attack
Iraq is amazing to me. Why does he so
fervently insist on this war? Why
didn't he accept compromises from
Britain or from
Canada which might have allowed for a more peaceful resolution of the situation? Why is Iraq such a threat now? Can't it wait? I know the
arguments against this position -- we've been waiting for 13 years and so on,
but the reality is that over these 13 years,
Iraq hasn't done anything to endanger the American people. And yet here we are, traumatizing the Iraqi people.
What's worse, just about everyone doesn't agree with
Bush. They see him as a warmonger,
and as an aggressive, arrogant symbol of
America . Sure, some governments have stood
up in support of the
US , but most of those (like
Colombia , where we are funding their military in the "war on drugs") only stood up
because they are getting money from the
US . Turkey's people are about 90%
against the war, the parliament voted against helping the US, and even a
massive, 15 billion dollar bribe couldn't convince them otherwise. Old
allies disagree with us. We tried our best to strongarm everyone into
supporting our war, and we called this strongarming "diplomacy." Is this the humble, peace loving
America that I used to believe in?
Why would Bush be so eager to engage in this war? Well, honestly, I think it's because he first of all has a simple view
of the world -- good and evil. Saddam
is evil. Evil must be attacked. We are good. Therefore, we
attack evil. Also,
Iraq happens to have a lot of oil. Oil
is money. Although it might be
complicated and not so simple as this, getting a new government in
Iraq that is willing to accept
US orders would be very good for the US economy in the long term. Bush
knows this, and it certainly factored into his decision.
What Bush doesn't know is just how scary this is to the
rest of the world. The US is acting as a sole aggressor. It's
military is unchecked by anything else in the world -- not even the UN and
France and Russia and China put together can dissuade the US from attacking. International agreements and alliances that have secured peace in
many regions are crumbling under this new pressure.
I only hope that Bush is held to his word: America should do everything
possible to avoid terrorizing the Iraqi people, who just want to finally live in
peace. I don't care if Saddam put military stuff in civilian areas --
there is no excuse for American troops killing any civilians. And, after
the war, the US has the responsibility to finance and facilitate the rebuilding
of Iraq so that the Iraqi
people can live in freedom and peace. Their government should be a freely
elected democracy that is not simply a puppet of the US. The Iraqi oil
should not be usurped by US oil companies; it should be developed by the Iraqi
people as they see fit. We cannot abandon these people as we have already
abandoned the Afghanis (Where is the millions in aid we promised to the
Afghanis?)
Let's hope this horror is over as soon as possible, and let's hope that
America's standing in the world can be redeemed despite our poor choices.
