Answering the Challenges of Lofty Rhetoric--Mallaby--WaPo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/18/AR2006061800902.html

Answering the Challenges of Lofty Rhetoric

By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, June 19, 2006; A21



You can't read an account of Condoleezza Rice's Greensboro performance without thinking "veep" -- and maybe, ultimately, bigger. Her language flashed with powerful phrases -- people in repressive societies "whisper to God in the silent sanctuaries of their conscience" -- and she invoked her early girlhood spent in two rooms at the back of a church to dissolve her distance from the audience. But the substance of her speech was just as intriguing: an appeal for international engagement with a twist in its tail, which may point the way out of a central foreign policy dilemma.

Here's the dilemma. To inspire support for a muscular foreign policy, U.S. leaders feel the need to deliver paeans to freedom and democracy, and to America's special role in promoting them. This isn't a new need: Bill Clinton's second secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was fond of calling the United States the "indispensable nation." But America's exalted sense of its importance can be grating to foreigners. The moment America falls short of its ideals, the world is quick to cry hypocrisy -- and anti-Americanism deepens.

You can see this phenomenon at work in the new Pew Global Attitudes survey , which reports that fully 98 percent of Germans have heard of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. That's an extraordinary proportion: Only 76 percent of Americans have heard of the two jails, and only 66 percent of Germans have heard of U.S. assistance to the victims of Pakistan's earthquake. In the other European countries in Pew's survey, the proportion who had heard of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was nearly as remarkable: 88 percent in France, 90 percent in Spain and Britain.

Europeans know all about U.S. mistreatment of prisoners because the European media adore stories that deflate America's self-image. Before the war on terrorism, they delighted in covering U.S. inner-city violence and the depravities of death row; then the same appetite switched to Guantanamo, even before evidence emerged of serious abuses there. The brutal treatment of prisoners by an ordinary country wouldn't be nearly as striking. But U.S. leaders wax so eloquent about human rights and the rule of law. Their lapses present irresistible targets.

How can America's attachment to foreign policy ideals be prevented from fueling anti-Americanism? One answer is that the lofty rhetoric should be toned down, and sometimes there's a case for that. The Bush administration has been right, for example, to avoid engaging in a clash of visions with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, which would only bolster Chavez as an anti-American hero -- even though Chavez has tried mightily to provoke, calling Bush a "donkey," a "coward" and a "drunkard."

smallaby@washpost.com

ANOTHER CONDI WHITEWASH--A PECULIARLY OFFENSIVE IDEA, DON'T YOU AGREE?

EUROPEANS KNOW ABOUT ABU GRAIB BECAUSE THEY ARE ON THE FRONTLINES IN THE JIHAD--AMERICANS DON'T BECAUSE THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA PROTECTS THEIR SHELL PINK EARS AND THEIR IGNORANCE AND DELUSIONS.