How to save
Brand America
As Iraqis quake in justified terror, Americans
fret about the threat to their 'values' and wonder why they are so widely
disliked. Here one friend of America lists the reasons... and the remedy
Henry Porter
Sunday March 23, 2003
The London The Observer
On Friday evening a spokesman from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences in Los Angeles explained that it was important to continue
with a scaled-down Oscar ceremony 'when American values were under attack'.
As his statement was relayed by the BBC we learned that American B52s
had dropped their payload over Iraq and that hundreds of cruise missiles
were striking at Baghdad. The TV screen began to pulse with livid blooms
from the explosions.
I can't have been the only one to wonder how the
man from the Academy had produced the classic response of victimhood when
at that very moment American values were being unambiguously asserted
at the heart of Saddam's regime. That night's bombing will be remembered
in the Arab world for a generation or more.
No one in the Middle East can possibly fail to take the lesson about the
reach and precision of US military might, let alone the determination
to use it. But once the hostilities are over in Iraq, the greatest challenge
to the American Imperium is to replace some of the fear that the bombing
has inspired with a reputation for fairness and doing what it has promised
in Iraq and Palestine.
Last year, before Bush had decided to act on Iraq, the White House commissioned
a report from advertising and media executives on the way America was
seen in the world. The report shook Bush. Even America's allies characterised
the US as arrogant, self-aborbed and hypocritical. Bush reacted by setting
up an office of global communications in the White House, removing the
responsibility for selling 'Brand America' from the State department.
It duly began work last autumn.
If selling the US presented problems last year, the task is vastly more
difficult today. A country which stands for individual freedom and whose
people are so eager to do the right thing - even though, as Churchill
observed, they may explore all other options beforehand - is now considered
by millions to be halfway between behemoth and pariah.
Americans are amazed by the slide in their standing, particularly after
the attacks of 9/11. Last year Congressman named Henry Hyde asked: 'How
is it that a country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue has allowed
such a destructive and parodied image of itself to become the intellectual
coin of the realm?'
The short answer to this is that Hollywood and Madison Avenue are used
to sell the American dream to Americans and a once-receptive audience
outside the US. They are not remotely equipped to address the deep rifts
in policy and purpose which have opened up between the United States and
the rest of the world. Like it or not, America is seen as greedy and domineering,
and this is a dangerous development for all those who believe that liberal
democracy depends on America's success and acceptance in the world.
In the two-and-half years since Bush came to power after a disputed Florida
count involving just 170,000 unreadable ballot papers, attitudes have
greatly sharpened, partly because Bush's mandate remained unconvincing
but also because of the unapologetic nature of his regime. The exercise
of power came to the new administration as second nature.
Many of its members - Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz - were
veterans of up to four previous Republican administrations. In exile they
had seized the idea - in a way Clinton never chose to - that the power
of the US, financially, technologically and militarily, could and should
be deployed to consolidate American dominance in the twenty-first century.
At the same time, Bush seemed a second-rate figure and his unshakeable
self-satisfaction was hard to attribute to any achievement or intellectual
distinction. Instead, he appeared to be the passive beneficiary of his
father's career. And George Junior seemed to be a man so untroubled by
his actions that he was in bed and asleep 45 minutes after addressing
the nation on TV this week. To many this was the action of a man too breezily
unimaginative to envisage the bombardment that would take place over Baghdad.
Unfair maybe, but that is how it looked.
Another characteristic of the administration which is responsible for
the new levels of anti-Americanism is that it not only disdains meaningful
consultation with lesser powers, it does not even bother to go through
the motions. When Roosevelt returned from Yalta he stopped off in Egypt
to consult and explain. When America was building the alliance for the
1991 Gulf war, Secretary of State James Baker toured the Middle East to
reassure Turkey and its Arab neighbours. Bush, on the other hand, has
no knowledge of the Middle East and his Secretary of State Colin Powell
has mostly remained in Washington and New York these past months to make
sure that Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz didn't make a grab for US foreign
policy.
But it would be wrong to blame Bush and co for America's reputation today.
Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the victory of the 1991 Gulf
war there has been a gradual increase in what historian and author Margaret
Macmillan, in her book, Peacemakers , calls 'American exceptionalism'.
'Faith in their own exceptionalism,' she writes, 'has sometimes led to
a certain obtuseness on the part of Americans, a tendency to preach at
other nations rather than listen to them, a tendency to assume that American
motives are pure where those of others are not.'
The habit of exceptionalism came to the fore during the Clinton era when
despite a seemingly amenable diplomatic stance there were many occasions
when America opted out. It was of course Clinton's government that failed
to sign a treaty banning landmines because US personnel might be compromised
in the Korean demilitarised zone. Clinton also refused to ratify the treaty
to set up the International Criminal Court in Rome. Why? Because America
believes its international responsibilities as chief peacekeeper and enforcer
placed its citizens at unusual risk of prosecution.
In his first months of the Bush presidency the US opted out the Kyoto
agreement to limit carbon emissions and the Anti-Ballistic Missiles treaty
on the grounds that it wanted to develop a missile defence system. Last
summer plans to provide the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention with inspection
powers were blocked by the Bush administration - which, given the pretext
for going to war on Iraq, certainly seems a bit rich.
Across a broad range of activities America either asserted its right to
special privileges or simply declared itself to be above the law. The
most starkly hypocritical example was when in March last year the free
trade enthusiasts of the Republican administration capitulated to demands
by US steel makers to impose tough new tariffs on steel imports. At the
same time America, as a country which strongly advocated a plan to reduce
subsidies and tariffs in farming around the world, insisted on its right
to give $100 billion in subsidies to its own farmers.
It has become clear that America has been shrewdly manipulating many agendas
in its own interests. Some of these initiatives are so obscure or technical
that they never reach the public consciousness, but they are important
nonetheless.
For instance, in January last year Professor Robert Hunter Wade of the
London School of Economics pointed out that the US had manipulated 'the
World Trade Organisation to commit to a General Agreement on Trade in
Services that will facilitate a global market in private health care,
welfare, pensions, education and water, supplied - naturally - by US companies,
and which will undermine political support for universal access to social
services in developing countries'.
Later in the same article he says: 'Globalisation and global supervisory
organisations enable the United States to harness the rest of the world
to its own rhythms and structures.'
In other words, we are dancing to the American tune, probably much more
than any of us in the cushioned West appreciate. In the developing world,
however, there is a strong yet ill-defined sense that living standards
are kept low in order to allow Americans to consume far more than they
actually produce.
It would be unfair to reach these harsh conclusions without pointing out
that America does provide much aid and expertise to the developing world
and pours billions of dollars into peacekeeping operations. Still there
is a gathering conviction that America is, to use the word of the moment,
in state of persistent non-compliance on too many protocols, agreements,
treaties and conventions to number. And that cannot be a good thing for
the reputation of the US, nor an impression easily reversed by a few eager
young men selling Brand America.
To a fond outsider like myself, America has become perplexingly inconsistent.
Though this administration talks up democratic values it actively supports
dictatorships in Pakistan and central Asia, and wobbled when a democratically
elected government was threatened with a coup in Venezuela. Too often
the Bush government's principles are forgotten in the cause of political
expedience. And this has been true during the fight against terrorism
at home where suspects have been arrested and isolated from the normal
judicial process without a qualm.
I've been amazed how quickly Americans have gone along with the loss of
treasured and symbolic rights and saddened that the American media has
not done more to oppose the authorities.
It is difficult to overestimate the shock that 9/11 delivered to the American
psyche. Security has become a national obsession. It seems odd to the
outside world that while US troops were being deployed in the Gulf, Americans
were stocking up on bottled water and tape to seal their homes from chemical
weapons attacks. There is something rather panicky and self-obsessed about
the US today and it is in this atmosphere that any challenge to the government
or security agencies is immediately classed as unpatriotic.
Americans will bridle at these observations, but as Philip Roth pointed
out in October, since 9/11 they have indulged in 'an orgy of national
narcissism and a gratuitous victim mentality which is repugnant'.
Now the bombs have rained on Baghdad it is time for America to stop worrying
about its values being under attack and to re-engage with the world, showing
the openness and generosity that was once so admired. That is the only
way to reinvigorate Brand America.
Empire State, a novel by Henry Porter
about a US/UK counter-terrorist operation, is published by Orion in September.
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