The world has drifted apart from U.S.

Jonathan Power, Columnist, London

The tragedy of September 11th was not just the incinerated bodies and the shock to the political nervous system of our one and only superpower, it is that a year later it has led to America becoming separated from the world at large. Governments may still pay formal allegiance to Washington, but behind the fagade of politeness few have a kind word.

As for the people, who last had a conversation where real empathy for America's predicament was readily apparent? Even the most sympathetic or most loyal have their doubts. It was not that "America had it coming to it". That would be to exaggerate (although a poll published today reports that a majority of Europeans think that U.S. policy is partially to blame for the September 11th attack).

But having been hit so hard in the solar plexus America then seemed to rear up like a wounded elephant and trample everyone's grass, while bellowing that "who is not with us is against us". The world suddenly saw America in a sharper light. What had been fuzzy before became less ambiguous, the contours sharper and the image clearer -- the pizazz of American life, cultural, political or militaristic, at one time considered stimulating, reassuring, even envy-making, now seemed, depending on the vantage point, a bridge too far, a highway to damnation, a path to perdition or, at the very least, simply a road map to where people did not want their own societies to head. One didn't have to be an earnest Muslim to feel this.

Hypocrisy is a tribute which vice pays to virtue. Few maybe have yet stopped watching the violent and sexually loaded films or the pornographic Spam that America pours out to the word. No one, apart from a few anxious Saudis, has pulled out their fortunes from their American investments.

No one, even the more economically and political secure Europeans, dare challenge America directly in a way it hurts, like announcing the closure of NATO assets for use in a war against Iraq. But underneath there is an ebb tide that Americans should ignore at their peril. To win a round, whether it be in Afghanistan or in Iraq, but lose the world is not a very clever thing to do.

Americans like to think of their country, to quote Ronald Reagan, as "a shining city on a hill". Maybe in Madison, Wisconsin, there is something of that. But in most American big cities there is the most appalling racial discrimination (despite the remarkable emancipation of a black middle class), crime, social and family disintegration, school violence and urban decay. America's prisons can offer the worst of the Soviet gulag and American justice is reserved for those with deep pockets.

Its propensity to see violence as the preferred political solution is no new philosophy of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld but runs like a ribbon through the recent history of the fratricidal Central American wars, the long running tribal war in Angola, the initial war in Afghanistan when Osama bin Laden and his friends were operating against the Soviet army under the tutelage of the CIA, back to the wars of Vietnam and Cambodia, which even many on the right in America now consider a terrible mistake, so pointless became the carnage relative to what was largely an imagined problem of hostile communist takeover. Yet on every occasion God is regularly invoked as a support and sanction, reminding us of Olusegun Obasanjo's apt and penetrating remark, "God is quite capable of upholding his own causes".

The threat from global terrorism is "at least partly a reaction to the looming global presence of the United States", as Prof. Steven Walt of Harvard has succinctly put it. "Some Americans are likely to ask if the danger might also be reduced if it were not as visibly and actively engaged in trying to run the world." Only when voices from within like his are seriously listened to will America avoid the disaster it is now on course to head into. A war with Iraq, as former National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, has wisely argued, will throw the whole of Middle East into a period of serious political disturbance.

If America does manage to depose Saddam Hussein it is quite likely on past performance to end up putting its weight behind an equally malevolent figure. (After all it is not so long ago since Washington gave satellite intelligence and military guidance to Saddam in his war against its neighbor Iran.) The outwards waves thrown up by the turbulence of a war with Iraq is also likely to embolden the extremists in Pakistan who could with a deft assassination throw that nuclear-armed country into the hands of the politically irresponsible.

America may bully its way past its European allies and over and round the despairing council of its Arab friends all the way to Baghdad. Conceivably it will pull off the regime change, perhaps the democratization, it says it wants. But the chances of success are slim. This operation even more than Vietnam has too many uncertain and difficult elements that could make it go badly wrong.

Last time everyone said "come home America" and friends and partners from all over the world rushed to help bind up the psychological wounds and help America simply (too simply) put Vietnam behind it.

But this time if things go wrong the tide has already turned. When America loses its chutzpah and looks for support it could well find itself beached on a long and desolate no man's land. Who any longer will want to stand up and be seen as a friend of America?