[Peace-discuss] An Obsession the World Doesn't Share

[Paul M. King]

An Obsession the World Doesn't Share
By ROGER COHEN

Published: December 5, 2004

RIO DE JANEIRO — The United States has a strategic problem:
its war on terror, unlike its long fight against Communism, is
not universally seen as the pivotal global struggle of the age.

Rather, it is often portrayed abroad as a distraction from
more critical issues - as an American attempt to impose a
bellicose culture, driven by the cultivation of fear, on a
world still taken with the notion that the cold war's end and
technology's advance have opened unprecedented possibilities
for dialogue and peace.
	
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Here in Brazil, plagued by problems of poverty and
development, the policies of the International Monetary Fund
arouse more interest than Al Qaeda's. The violence that is
debated is not that of Islamic holy warriors but of drug
barons and their private militias occupying the favelas, or
slums, of Rio and São Paulo.

In South Africa, the issues of the day are 40 percent
unemployment, crime, disease and addressing the problems of a
continent that is home to many of the 1.3 billion people in
the world who live on less than $1 a day. Terrorism is not the
theme of the hour.

The cold war was refracted through Latin America and Africa in
the form of countless battles between surrogates of Washington
and Moscow. But the war on terror has neither divided nor
engaged these continents in the same way. That, on balance, is
a good thing: the American-Soviet struggle took a huge toll on
societies from Argentina to Angola that still bear the scars.

What is less good, from the American perspective, is that
these continents are more or less united in a critical view of
an American power routinely described as hegemonic and intent
on using the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to impose what Candido
Mendes, a Brazilian political analyst, called "a civilization
of fear."

Mr. Mendes, who has written several books about Brazil's
left-leaning president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said: "The
exploitation of fear is a highly developed and refined
science, but Brazil is not convinced by this culture that
triumphed in the American election. What concerns us in Latin
America is that, in the name of defending its security, the
United States will escalate the wars it has begun."

The cold war world adhered to a simple paradigm: free
societies, led by the United States, confronting Communism,
with its headquarters in the Kremlin. But for all of President
Bush's attempts to frame the current conflict against Islamic
terrorism as one of equally epochal and all-enveloping
proportions, it is now clear that the world has resisted such
a single, overarching framework.

In wide swaths of the southern hemisphere, including Africa
and Latin America, the central preoccupation is economic
development and trade. In Asia, the main focus is on China
rising, with India not far behind. In Europe, the bulk of
political energy is still absorbed by the vast experiment in
transnational governance and the banishment of war that is the
European Union.

Because America's central preoccupation - the war on terror -
is not widely shared, it tends to isolate the United States, a
country whose power is now so overwhelming as to invite
dissent and countervailing currents. Mr. Bush seems aware of
his problems. On a visit to Canada last week, he described his
second term as "an important opportunity to reach out to our
friends," and expressed gratitude to those Canadians who waved
at him "with all five fingers."

Many Americans might be tempted to use four fewer fingers in
response to the world's hostility. They might be tempted to
retort to a restive global community: Your memories are short,
and if a bunch of crazed Islamic jihadists get their hands on
loose nukes, you'll understand why we are fighting this war.
They might care to use a quotation often attributed to George
Orwell: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only
because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

But for now, the image of rough Americans ready to do violence
is more alienating than comforting to Latin Americans and
Africans.

"Anti-Americanism is generalized and growing," said Luiz
Felipe Lampreia, a former Brazilian foreign minister. "The
whole Iraq situation has brought back memories of the big
stick - American power as used in Nicaragua or Chile during
the cold war. The problem is the perception that Bush uses
immense power in an egotistical way."

The animosity engendered was evident during President Bush's
recent visit to Santiago, Chile, where he confronted angry
crowds who were not waving. This situation has its paradoxes:
the Bush administration's policies toward Latin America have
been generally pragmatic and restrained.

Trade differences with Brazil, once acute over steel, have
been quietly patched up, although Brazil's push to fight
subsidies to farmers in rich countries continues. Mr. da Silva
and Mr. Bush get along well, two straight-talking guys who
like to brush past details, not least the fact that they come
from opposing political camps. In theory, this could be a time
marked more by harmony than hostility.

A similar situation prevails in South Africa. The United
States is pouring more money into tackling the AIDS epidemic
than any other country. Mr. Bush has made this fight a
priority of his administration.

The personal relations between Mr. Bush and Thabo Mbeki, the
South African president, are good. The African Growth and
Opportunity Act, strongly supported by Mr. Bush, has provided
important new trade openings by removing tariffs in several
sectors, including automobiles.

Yet the president is routinely dismissed in the South African
press as the Texas Twit and gets no credit for any of the
policies that are helping the country or Africa as a whole.
Dr. Jendayi E. Frazer, the American ambassador to South
Africa, said that government-to-government relations were
excellent, but that the prevailing atmosphere meant that
"people who support the United States cannot come out and say it."

Here lies part of the price of the war on terror, and
particularly the war in Iraq, for the United States and Mr.
Bush: the good done quietly on other fronts gains scant
recognition because war against a constant terrorist threat is
seen to be the overriding message from the administration.

If Condoleezza Rice, nominated by Mr. Bush to be the next
secretary of state, is to change this negative impression, she
may have to concede that the war on terror is not, like the
cold war, a label for an era. It describes the focus of
America, a new principle and project guiding national policy,
but it describes no more than that, because other countries
have other agendas. What these countries want, above all, is
to sense that the Bush administration, in its second term,
hears them.

Roger Cohen writes the "Globalist" column in The International
Herald Tribune.