Of Hubris and Atrocities: Why Do They All Hate America?

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/10091

Of Hubris and Atrocities: Why Do They All Hate America?
by Brian Cloughley | Sep 23 2007


Many years ago there was a song called "Why do we all love Australia" which was a bit of a spoof although funny and to the point. The main thing was that it was ironic and encouraged people to laugh at themselves, which does us all good from time to time. But there is nothing funny or ironical about a major international matter of the moment: Why do they all hate America?

It isn't good for the world to have such a hate figure. Recent and current actions by Washington haven't bound nations together, as fear and loathing of an outsider sometimes do. There is no benefit from the world-wide perception that the America of Bush and Cheney is astonishingly arrogant. And the problem is that this arrogance has created and continues to spawn an unknown but obviously large number of fanatics who want to destroy a country whose leader revels in displaying an insolent and unjustified superiority.

snip//

Then there is the amazingly idiotic US announcement of a 30 billion dollar military support program for Israel over the next decade. Has nobody in Washington got any idea just how much resentment and hatred this proclamation caused in the Islamic world? It is regarded as contemptuous spurning of the Muslim community, irrespective of the other billions to be given to rich oil-producing Arab countries. The process is only transfer of money from American taxpayers to US weapons' manufacturers, but in international political terms it is disastrous.

The State Department could have made it clear to the White House that cash for Israel would send an incendiary message. In fact it is probable that State's professionals did warn that there would be uproar and reaction. But since the time that State was right in its advice about the war on Iraq it has been distrusted and reviled by the warniks. The Secretary of State has become a joke and one of her Under Secretaries, Nicholas Burns (a career officer, alas), has sold his soul to the Company Store and declared that the 30 billion dollar endorsement of the nuclear-armed Israeli military machine "says to the Iranians and Syrians that the United States is the major power in the Middle East and will continue to be and is not going away."

What right has America (or any other country) to trumpet itself so imperiously as "the major power" anywhere in the world? In fact, most people very much want the United States to cease meddling in the Middle East because its influence, activity and undeviating support of Israel have produced nothing but chaos.

We don't have to ask: "Why Do They All Hate America?"

It's obvious.

the homeland "created" by the neocons, and their "bring it on" actions and mentality.

The old America wasn't perfect but most people seemed to like it (in the Clinton era at least).