It may be satisfying for the soul, but it’s never ever going to happen in a zillion centuries. Let’s stick to reality.
When Bush and Cheney got back in in 2004 ,we sealed our rep . They are our Cowboys ,shoot first and ask questions later. That is part of our international problem. If they had been soundly defeated ,it may have been salvagable. Another 4 was a blow to our rep. We will torture and exploit . We will start wars and our people will back them.
Yeah, that lack of a vote on a non-binding resolution really put the administration in its place, didn’t it?
If you happened to look at my location you would have noted I’m Canadian.
Canadian soldiers are also fighting, and dieing, in Afghanistan, and have also been killed by friendly fire.
Any anti-Americanism that I’ve heard is soundly placed on the current administration, and not on the military, or on the country as a whole.
As a neighbour of the U.S. I would gladly lend them my lawnmower or circular saw any day.
Ireland.
We have welcomed every visiting president with very large and very public ceremonies; these were celebrations of our cultural links. Bush was the exception. He had to have a ring of steel around him because of the hatred. This isn’t an anti American thing though it’s an anti Bush thing.
We had a national day of remembrance after 9-11. The country shut down for the day. Schools, government offices and any private firm who could did. There was a 1-2 mile queue outside the US embassy for close to a week.
Now, your rep is in the toilet. Start acting like a civilised country again and you will get it back.
Wouldn’t work; if we want to restore America’s reputation in the most efficient manner, we have to show the rest of the world that we stand by our laws and our values – such as not tolerating “pre-emptive” wars started on false pretenses.
You do shit like that, you get punished hard. “Drift[ing] off with lousy reputations” is the diplomatic equivalent of a stern finger-waggle.
This notion that the US has ever stood by its actions or avoided preemptive wars is entirely baseless. What about Teddy Roosevelt’s little stint in the Phillipines? What about the United Fruit Company and Guatemala? There’s a pretty long list that one could make, stretching back nearly 100 years, of selfish, destructive, imperial action on the part of America.
Secondly, the war in Iraq certainly angers Arabs and Muslims around the world, but the US is arguably just a scapegoat for the Middle East’s troubles. Certainly the war in Iraq is an excuse to dislike the US, not the cause – which is to say, my classmate from Guatemala gets a whole lot more angry about what the US did to her country than what the US has done to Iraq.
The US has represented and will continue to represent both the triumphs and the tragedies of globalization and westernization. American companies are almost universal, and their wares reach every corner of the globe. But are cheap products always beneficial to a less-developed country? And are all the western companies in an LDC providing jobs and injecting money, or are they just filching resources?
Nobody was going to remember three thousand deaths indefinitely, not even *American * deaths, not even skyscrapers collapsing. America/Bush’s actions and blind arrogance certainly sped up the process of forgetting, but frankly, the US is the superpower. Pissing people off comes as a part of that role.
Of course, even people who hate America won’t stop buying its products or selling their natural resources to it. Self interest is, at the end of the day, the governing force of international relations.
(I’m a Canadian, BTW.)
A History of American Wars Not every one is blind to our actions. He is a compilation of our transgressions. To some we are just a colonialist power.