US has more friends than enemies today?

US has more friends than enemies today
By Khalid Hasan
Daily Times, January 9, 2007

WASHINGTON: The United States has more enemies than friends today and the post-Cold War world is less ordered and predictable than the bipolar order that preceded it, according to former ambassador Chas W Freeman Jr, who heads the Middle East Institute, a respected liberal think tank.

In an address to 50 new congressmen, Freeman, who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia, noted that it was ironic that, “with so much less to be frightened about, we seem so much more fearful than before”. The threats are real but no politician dares to put them in perspective.

He said with the USSR gone, “the foreign enemies we make no longer have a patron; they’re on their own. So, if we kill foreigners in their homelands, there’s no one they care about with a stake in stopping them from trying to kill us in ours. We must do this thankless task ourselves. We must do it by dissolving their motivation to assault us, draining them of their resolve, dissuading them from the path of violence, deterring those who cannot be dissuaded, and killing those who cannot be deterred.”

He pointed out that the problems the US faces in Iraq are primarily political, not military, but what was lacking was not military might but political acumen. “Our failings are not those of muscle but of the mind,” he said. According to him, the first Gulf War never really ended. Washington had also “fumbled” its response to the open emergence of a nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan, nor did it focus its leadership on the challenge of terrorists with global reach until they had actually attacked. The US had defaulted on the search for peace between Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arabs. It had proved unable to set clear objectives or produce a strategy for achieving them in Afghanistan, and it yet had to produce a coherent strategy for dealing with North Korea or Iran or China, Russia, the European Union or the United Nations.

Freeman reminded the newly-elected congressmen that in fiscal 2006, the defence budget was $441.5 billion, a good bit more than the combined military spending of the world’s other 192 countries, amounting to 3.6 percent or so of the economy. But actually security-related expenditure was scattered all around the budget, so the figure was much higher than that listed. He said in 2003, the Department of Homeland Security drew up a list of 160 sites in the US that terrorists might see as targets. Within a few months, there were 1,849 targets and by the end of 2004, 28,360. “Today bearded terrorists in the remote caves of Waziristan are officially feared to be planning attacks on about 300,000 targets all over our country, including - I was truly shocked and awed to learn - the Indiana Apple and Pork Festival.”

The former envoy asked the congressmen, “Do we really think that public insults and a refusal to meet or talk with people with whom we disagree are the best way to persuade them to embrace our viewpoint? … Do we judge that ostracism and beatings are the best way to teach even dogs and children to behave, let alone hostile adults? If not, why do we allow those who appear to believe these absurd things bully those who don’t into silence?” He said the US had made Afghanistan “safe for the poppy cultivators and warlords but not for democracy.” In the broader Islamic world, Afghanistan is now seen as evidence of a broad American-led assault by the West on all Muslims. He said, “As a result of the growing gap between our smug self-image and the way people overseas perceive us, we’re neither as attractive to the rest of the world nor as sought after as we once were.” He said an America “proficient at arms and the arts of persuasion alike would again have the world’s support, not its animosity. Such an America could hope successfully to manage the challenges of national security in the age of terrorism.”