Yanks at Oxford
Yanks at Oxford
by Richard Reeves
uExpress (also appeared in Yahoo! News, The Hartford Courant, and Tulsa World)
06/06/2003
OXFORD, England -- More than 250 of the 900 or so Americans enrolled at Oxford's 40 separate colleges have formed a group called Americans for Informed Democracy. They are an eclectic bunch of students trying to persuade other students -- British, European, Muslim -- that the United States is not a simple or simple-minded place.
I'd join if I were young enough, smart enough or lucky enough to win a place here. The members, spending less than $1,000 so far sponsoring speakers, setting up forums and writing pieces for student publications, are trying to get across the reality that not all Americans are George W. Bush and not all Americans are Bush-bashers.
That's not so easy anywhere in the world these days, with the president of the United States regularly rearing up to say, "You're either for us or you're against us." It is certainly not easy here, where in the words of Christopher Bradley, a doctoral student from Dallas, interviewed by The New York Times: "Oxford (has a) smug liberal core and academic condescension."
That is true. But there are many Americans who think that the Bush White House is just as smug and condescending. Still, said David Tannebaum, a recent Princeton graduate, "We have tried very hard not to appear to be Bush-bashers."
American students abroad have been on a slippery slope here for a year or two. Those who arrived in September of 2001 were hugged in the streets after the jet attacks on the World Trade Center. American flags flew everywhere. Those were the days when Le Monde in Paris headlined: "We are all Americans now."
No one is saying that anymore. Since the buildup to the invasion of Iraq began, America is seen as the bully of the world, even here in the land of our only knee-jerk allies. The government of Great Britain may stand with us, but most people you meet here seem to think we are mad. That, by the way, was not helped much when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld compared looters in Iraq with soccer fans in England.
You may have seen reports of the polls taken around the world by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, which questioned 66,000 people in 50 countries. Picking the obvious example, France, the number who viewed the United States "somewhat unfavorably" or "very unfavorably" went from 34 percent in the summer of 2002 to 57 percent last month. They may be a flighty bunch, but we were more volatile. The "somewhat unfavorable" and "very unfavorable" attitudes of America toward France went from 16 percent in 2002 to 60 percent last month.
The results were even more unfavorable in Muslim countries. These are the unfavorable percentages in a few of them: Jordan, 99 percent; Indonesia, 83 percent; Turkey, 83 percent; Pakistan, 81 percent. (The Indonesian percentage was 36 percent 10 months ago.)
Another foreign view of the new United States in action came from an invariably pro-American French intellectual, Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the Institute Francais des Relations Internationales, who last week described America's new policies and attitudes as "democratic bolshevism." Writing in Le Monde, he continued: "For Americans, the only way they can protect themselves is to change the world by imposing democracy everywhere it does not exist, starting with the Middle East."
Then he concluded: "If they were fully aware of the scale and cost of their ambitions, Americans would quickly resume cultivating their allies instead of dividing and denigrating them. Nothing in the world can be done without the United States, yet from democratizing Iraq to pursuing peace in the Middle East, nothing in the long run can be done successfully by the United States alone."
Our young people at Oxford seem to understand that. More power to them. With luck, they will be able to persuade some of their elders, particularly the smug tough guys in the White House who think we have the right and capability to push the world around to wherever we want it to be.