Voting Global
Protestors in Kolkata, India burn George W. Bush in effigy
earlier this year. Photo by Alex Stonehill.
On September 11th, I flew back to Seattle after almost a year reporting in Asia and the Middle East for independent media.
Though I was thrilled to finally be back in the land of football and quality Mexican food, my homecoming was soured by the realization that little had changed in American politics while I was away. The tearful memorials and TV events commemorating the fifth anniversary of 9/11 that filled the airwaves emphasized the sad truth that my time abroad had revealed – that few tears of sympathy were likely being shed for America’s past tragedy in the countries I’d visited.
People in the developing world pay attention to what happens in America – many I met knew more about what was going on in our politics than I did. Bush’s re-election, America’s unwavering support of Israel during the War in Lebanon, “extraordinary rendition” and the blacklisting of Muslims seeking to immigrate to the US, amongst countless other foreign policy blunders made by our government over the past five years have taken their toll.
From India to Turkey, patience with America seems to have finally been exhausted.
One poignant example is Egypt. I had traveled there in 2003, just after the US invasion of Iraq, and had found most people enthusiastic about America. An elderly woman told me the story of how she’d wept on 9/11. Young men approached me on the street with excited questions about our political system, and shared their dreams of pursuing economic opportunities in the U.S.
But in Egypt, as in many other places I visited this time around, things seem to have changed. American flags are now conspicuously absent on the awnings of Cairo’s five star hotels. Tourists on the streets are disdainfully ignored by locals if they are lucky enough to escape all out anti-American heckling.
Despite what we might like to think, international opinion of America matters, and not just in Europe or other wealthy countries. Our globalized economic system depends on markets in developing countries being receptive to the products of American corporations and the attraction our country holds for talented foreign minds to immigrate here. The safety of our citizens when traveling abroad and our success in winning the war on terror depend on cooperation, not just from foreign governments, but also from their citizens.
One critical mistake the Bush Administration has made in pursuing the War on Terror is adopting the simplistic assumption that there are a fixed number of terrorists that need to be eliminated in any given country, and that the rest of the population is irrelevant. The more complex truth is that people’s opinions of the US, as well as of our enemies, are in a constant state of flux, shaped by what we - and they - do.
To put it another way that I’m sure President Bush and Karl Rove would be able to understand, the world is full of millions of swing voters who need to be courted by a smart, respectful foreign policy so they decide to re-elect America as the world’s superpower.
But this is a referendum that the Bush Administration no longer has any hope of winning. Bush’s international approval ratings are even more dismal than his domestic ones. Confidence in his international leadership hovers in the single digits throughout the Middle East, and isn’t much higher in other countries like Russia and Indonesia, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project.
Fortunately, there’s still hope for the rest of us. When we go to the polls on Tuesday, we should remember that the rest of the world is watching, and that we are voting not just on our own behalf, but for the 6.3 billion other people on the planet, some of whom are more directly affected by the actions of our government than we are.
We need to send a strong message that the foreign policy our country has undertaken in recent years is not okay with us. We can only do this by bringing fresh blood into our houses of congress - representatives who are serious not only about changing this failed course, but also about punishing those currently in power for their failures.
Bush and his crew have been impeached by world opinion several times over by now – it's time we made it official here at home.
© 2007 The Common Language Project
