www.csmonitor.com/specials/oneyearlater/livesChanged_good.html
America - from a pinnacle of military, economic, and political might unmatched in history - responded with force. In what it has cast as a battle between good and evil, the US toppled the Taliban and is now threatening 'regime change' in Iraq. But Americans see their global role differently from the way others see it. This is a command center for protest against American soldiers in Korea. The incident continues to galvanize anti-American feeling across the country. Members canvas neighborhoods, run e-mail campaigns detailing American soldiers' alleged crimes, and help organize a permanent silent vigil outside the presidential palace. Most ordinary Koreans, however, believe the US troops are actually here to promote American interests, opinion polls show. And "since 9/11, a strange but virulent anti-Americanism has gripped South Korea," notes one expatriate American who works at a US company in Seoul. Along with Japan, South Korea is one of America's chief strategic partners in the Pacific. It features cowboy-booted Americans being beaten up, fed to dogs, and tossed off buildings. Nor are American diplomats reassured by recent polls showing that nearly half of Koreans approved the February trashing of the US Chamber of Commerce in Seoul and that 60 percent of Koreans "don't like" America. But if the US doesn't wear a white hat here, where then? South Korea today offers one of the sharpest, and most surprising, examples of anger at the US role in the world since Sept. The current campaign grew out of the girls' deaths - and a widespread sense that the US authorities handled the case clumsily. It seems to feed on old grudges and a deep dismay at a newly unilateral America, touting a "with us or against us" approach. Today, even some of the country's firmest friends are alarmed by America's apparent unwillingness to take into account the views of other nations on issues ranging from the environment to dealing with Iraq. As the sole superpower for the past decade, America was already retooling its relationship with the rest of the planet before Sept. It pulled out of the Kyoto treaty on climate change, a step that rankled many. The United States feels threatened by Al Qaeda, and it's making its vast military and political superiority felt with unprecedented vigor - sending soldiers into Central Asia, Georgia, and the Philippines. Scores of interviews with government officials, political analysts, and ordinary citizens from one side of the globe to the other suggest that the US is now widely perceived as arrogant and - as war with Iraq looms - potentially reckless. You can hear the misgivings in the voices of Russian steel workers burned by Washington's decision this year to ignore free-trade principles and raise import tariffs. You can see them in a McDonald's franchise in Jakarta that works to hide its American connection. And in South Korea, for the first time, anti-Americanism is no longer a fringe emotion, fashionable on the political extremes. It has become a mainstream current of respectable opinion. But because of the way the US is wielding its military and political clout - more than its cultural hegemony - that admiration is increasingly overlaid by mistrust, misunderstanding, resentment, and even hostility across a broad spectrum of countries and citizens. There's a feeling that Washington doesn't care about them or their concerns. In Afghanistan and the Philippines, for example, US soldiers are generally well received. Sixty-six percent of Americans regard their country's actions as "usually or almost always" beneficial to the world according to a Monitor/TIPP poll taken in the past week. It is the only military power with global reach, spending more on guns and soldiers than the next 11 countries combined. It has 27 percent of the world's economic output, equal to the next three biggest countries combined. And it is in a league of its own when it comes to film and TV exports. But brute strength does not always add up to leadership, and raw power rarely fosters the sense of international common purpose needed to address problems with the environment, disease, immigration, or global economic stability. Larry Moore, Afghanistan 'We're doing this because these people need help. Shattered adobe buildings melt back into the dusty floor of the plain. But in the middle of the village rises a red-brick schoolhouse where 1,200 boys and girls will soon be studying, courtesy of the US Army. A few months ago, he says, American soldiers on patrol "saw our children studying under the shadows of trees and they decided to build a school. But that does not impress Karabagh policeman Abdul Ghafur. The US is more interested in the war against terrorists. Nick Parker, a British officer who is director of operational planning at coalition headquarters in Kabul, those two goals go hand in hand. America also has to offer other countries things they value if foreigners are to accept American moral leadership. In Johannesburg, for example, Korean environmental activists protested against Mr. Bush's absence from the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development. Resley, a Kansan, strides around her crafts factory in Nairobi, constantly taking charge. The Vietnam War was raging, and long before she reached Nairobi, she discovered that not everybody loved America. Now she runs Weaverbird, the company she founded that supplies many of the high-quality carpets, wall hangings, and pots that decorate Kenya's best hotels. She has also become one of Nairobi's best-known community activists, agitating against corruption and litter and in favor of government accountability. As the only human face her workers can put on a distant superpower, Jacqui Resley hears a lot from them - good and bad - about America. Chinese students are not shy about protesting US policies, but a demonstration outside the US Embassy in Beijing last month had an ironic twist in its tail: the college grads were demanding American visas. They work hard and they make in a year what it would take three years here to make. I don't want to be treated like a criminal," she says as she eats lunch at the Akmerkez, a new shopping mall in Istanbul that attracts the monied classes from around the Islamic world. Frustrated by US policy in the Middle East, and upset by what they see as the way America has demonized Muslims since last September, Tayiba and her husband, Mohammed, are part of a grass-roots campaign at home to boycott US-made goods. But Tayiba sheepishly admits that she couldn't pass up the lovely leather DKNY bag that sits on the table as the couple lunches with their two small boys. And although they have skipped the five American chain restaurants in the vast Akmerkez food court - preferring Middle Eastern food - they say they regret not having succeeded in weaning themselves off Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which the boys slug down with their rice and stewed eggplant. Abdul Rahman is one of the astonishingly numerous people in the Middle East who do not believe Osama bin Laden was responsible for the Twin Towers attack. He thinks that Israel and the American government organized the atrocity so as to justify a war on the Islamic world. Despite that sort of criticism aimed against it, many more governments are friendly to the US than was the case during the cold war, and many more have adopted the liberal democratic capitalist credo that America has been energetically exporting. Not that it always gets them where they had expected to go, especially when Washington itself betrays the principles it seeks to impose on others, such as free trade. The tariffs on foreign steel imports of up to 30 percent that Bush announced last March to shield domestic producers from competition have hit everything in Cheropovets from Mr. Borisov wipes the sweat from his brow with the grimy sleeve of his work shirt. Severstal must now seek new markets for the steel it had planned to sell in America - and those markets are following Washington's protectionist suit. Severstal has pledged not to lay off any workers, but it has abandoned planned wage increases in view of the projected loss of profits. The ripple effect...
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