May 17, 2006
As U.S. Image Free-Falls, Spin Wobbles Into Ditch
By ROGER COHEN International Herald Tribune
NEW YORK -- Karen Hughes talks fast. She talks a lot, zipping from point to point. She's a hybrid, one motor or another always running. She gives the impression of a woman racing against the tide.
The tide in question is anti-Americanism, perhaps the fastest-growing force in the world today. Hughes's job is to stem it, sap it, stop it. That's a big job. In fact, no bigger one exists for the United States.
Hughes, whose official title is under secretary of state for public diplomacy, and whose task Orwell would have characterized as chief propagandist, says she doesn't do spin, only facts.
"Now, of course I try to portray the facts in the best light for our country," she adds, "Because I believe we're a wonderful country and that we are doing good things across the world."
That's called spin. And the world isn't buying it. The image of the United States is in something close to a free fall.
There are lots of reasons, beginning with the fact that any elephant this big bestriding the world's stage is going to irk people, especially when George W. Bush is riding it. But I suspect a basic cause is that in the 65-year period of 1941-2006, the United States has been at war in some form or another for all but 14 years.
There was World War II and then, after a two-year break, the Cold War, which ran until 1989, and then, after an interlude of a dozen years, the war on terror. These were different sorts of wars, of course, and among them were Korea and Vietnam. But somewhere along the way, most acutely in the past few years, people got tired.
They got tired of America's insatiable need for an enemy; suspicious of the talk of freedom and democracy and morality in which every struggle was cast; forgetful of the liberty preserved by such might; alarmed at the American fear that appeared to fire American aggression; and disdainful of the distance between declarations and deeds.
In short they stopped buying the American narrative. ...
<http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2006/05/17/world/IHT-17globalist.html>
Carl