Replant the American Dream - WaPo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/24/AR2005112400474.html

...I don't think Americans realize how much we have tarnished those ideals in the eyes of the rest of the world these past few years. The public opinion polls tell us that America isn't just disliked or feared overseas -- it is reviled. We are seen as hypocrites who boast of our democratic values but who behave lawlessly and with contempt for others. I hate this America-bashing, but when I try to defend the United States and its values in my travels abroad, I find foreigners increasingly are dismissive. How do you deny the reality of Abu Ghraib, they ask, when the vice president of the United States is actively lobbying against rules that would ban torture?

...When I began traveling as a foreign correspondent 25 years ago, I thought I understood what the face of evil looked like. There were governments that used torture against their enemies; they might call it "enhanced interrogation" or some other euphemism, but it was torture, and you just hoped, as an American, that you were never unlucky enough to be their prisoner. There were governments that "disappeared" people -- snatched them off the street and put them without charges in secret prisons where nobody could find them. There were countries that threatened journalists with physical harm.

As an American in those days, I felt that I traveled with a kind of white flag. We were different. The world knew it. We might have allies in the Middle East or Latin America who used such horrifying methods. But these were techniques that Americans would never, ever use -- or even joke about. That was our seed corn -- the fact that we were different.

...We must stop behaving as if we are in a permanent state of war, in which any practice is justified by the exigencies of the moment. That's my biggest problem with Vice President Cheney's anything-goes jeremiads against terrorism. They suggest we will always be at war, and so it doesn't matter what the world thinks of our behavior. That's a dangerously mistaken view. We are in a long war but not an endless one, and we need to begin rebuilding the bridges to normal life.

The American people aren't doing this -- we were victim of a right-wing coup that went on without a peep from our allies. The Americans can't do anything at this point beyond save ourselves and our friends, and protest to the degree we can.

On the other hand, any European pointing a finger at the US is employing nothing more than Alpha primate politics couched in human hypocrisy. We're ALL responsible for what has happened... all Europeans (speaking of us as an ethnic group)... not just Americans.

How on earth is the average American more empowered to do something than a leader in France or another country? Clearly, we're not.

They have worked tooth and nail to create perpetual war. BTW-Americans are not reviled overseas. Bush and U.S. policy are hated. Big, big difference.I've been to Ireland and Argentina in the last year and upon expressing my discontent with the Bushys was treated like gold.