I used to travel in the same activist circles as Obama, albeit in the Pacific Northwest. For instance, I often went folk dancing with Kathy Boudin in Corvallis, a Weather Underground colleague of Dorhn's who wasn't fortunate enough to have completely escaped incarceration. (When I knew her, she didn't answer to the name "Kathy Boudin," and I never actually saw her crack a smile.) [Note: I am mistaken in identifying Alice Metzinger as Kathy Boudin. She was Katherine Powers, who was equally guilty but who largely escaped consequences (other than her crushing guilt and self doubt.] I don't think there's any doubt that my former friends and associates are mostly supranationalist and anti-American, on pure principle. But I had my doubts even as I attended their meetings, often dominated by Marxists who had never bothered to actually read their own prophet.
In light of hypo's claim that 'it's all about the oil' in Iraq, let me offer a quote from Postel's book 'Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran' (the book Chris doesn't need to read).
The picture gets further complicated, and the Left gets further flummoxed, over the role of Empire in the Iranian context. The memory of the 1953 coup burns furiously in the minds of many Iranians to this day. Because anti-imperialism is our primary conceptual organizing principle, leftists are of course highly attuned to such sentiments. Particularly in this era of Empire fever and regime-change mania, we reflexively and viscerally oppose US interference in other countries - and understandably so. Anti-imperialist pronouncements coming out of Iran thus have a certain resonance for many leftists. The supreme cleric Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has characterized the students as "American mercenaries." As the Middle East scholar Juan Cole points out, that kind of accusation "has resonance in a country where US conspiracies to change the government - like the 1953 CIA coup - have actually succeeded." (It should be recalled, however, that the Islamists deploy the 1953 coup in bad faith: not only did they oppose Iranian president Mohammad Mossadegh for his secularism and liberalism; they even had their own plans to take him out. And after taking power in 1979, they obliterated the Mossadeghi National Front Party. This little footnote has largely been forgotten but is hugely relevant to the present situation.)
As the report in Dawn put it, the Musharraf regime used force and guile to send Nawaz Sharif bouncing back to Hotel Saudifornia. But as perspicacious commentators have it, no one in Pakistan actually won this round.
Gen Musharraf may have purchased some breathing room by expelling Nawaz Sharif. But by deciding to violate a Supreme Court decision, he has opened the doors for a new confrontation with the court and Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry. If the court decides to confront him on this--and this will be the acid test of its newfound independence--he might well have to declare martial law. That too is unlikely to work--because the America won't be able to cover him beyond that point. But also because the people might come out on the streets.
America is ignoring the popular movement against Musharraf to its own disadvantage
PostGlobal's Amar Bakshi is going around the world, lugging a laptop and a camcorder, to get a sense of how people in different countries view America. If he ever makes it to Pakistan, he's likely to find a country where anti-Americanism is rife. Pakistanis have genuine reasons to hold a negative opinion of American foreign policy---though not necessarily for the reasons Americans may be inclined to believe. Right now, they have little reason to nurse good feelings towards America, given Washington's determined refusal to demonstrate the smallest amount of sympathy for democracy and freedom in the ongoing confrontation between the people and the dictator.
If you really had to move away from the U.S. what country would afford you the most peace of mind/freedom from fascism? New Zealand?
Canada has just adopted the U.S. No Fly list and has gone conservative, governmentally that is
Denmark?
Fiji?
My own theory about these resentments includes the fact that, yes, we have done some things that were hurtful, but generally when our choices weren’t good in any case. One instance is our interference in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. We were engaged in an existential struggle with communism and, as part of that struggle we opposed communist dictatorships and supported other types of dictatorships. It is clearly resented in Latin America, but I can’t say I would do things differently given what we were facing. The whole world was a chess board with us playing the Soviet Union in a series of proxy conflicts, at least in part because if we fought one another, the outcome would have been horrendous.
