The fact that sympathy toward the United States has eroded since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has been widely reported. But support for values such as democracy is also eroding, scholars said at a Brown University event last week, and that is cause for concern.
The event, titled “9/11 + 5” and sponsored by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown, featured three scholars who have analyzed the growing resentment toward the United States, which they said is largely spurred by U.S. military campaigns in the Middle East and by the way in which the “war on terror” has been framed.
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Melani Cammett, the new director of the International Relations Program at Brown and an assistant professor of political science, led the discussion and spoke about her field work in Tunisia and Lebanon, where she traveled just before its clash this summer with Israel.
Cynicism toward the United States now extends to American products and values, Cammett said. That’s a change from the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, she said, when there was criticism of U.S. policies in the Middle East, but U.S. ideals such as innovation and democracy still garnered large support throughout the region.
As the U.S.-led operations in Iraq and the “war on terror” have dragged on, that support has weakened. By the end of 2004, support for American ideals had dropped by 20 percentage points, Cammett said. By the end of 2005, she said, support for those ideals in the region had dropped to about 10 percent.
Two factors in particular have precipitated that decline, she said.
First, people in the region view the U.S. policies in the Middle East as “selective use of coercion.” Though Iraq and Afghanistan were invaded to thwart the perceived enemies of the United States, more-brutal regimes such as that in Tunisia have been subjected to little U.S. pressure.
Second, Cammett said, many people in the region feel that the war on terror has taken on an unfair scope, including Arabic and Islamic groups that most people don’t consider terrorist organizations.
The end result, she said, is that America’s capacity to fight terrorism has been “arguably undercut” as the nation loses support in the region.
At home, Justine Rosenthal said, scholars have viewed the recent U.S. military and diplomatic efforts in the Middle East in an unfavorable light.
Rosenthal, a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute and the director of the Atlantic Monthly Foundation’s Council on Global Terrorism, said she had participated in a recent study conducted by “terrorism graybeards.”
The end result – a report card ranking U.S. goals and policy implementation in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks – looked at 75 different categories. In only four categories, Rosenthal said, did the United States rank above a “C.”
Although the report card looked at policies and results, she said, the threat of terrorism hitting the United States remains very real.
Squashing that threat will be a difficult task, Rosenthal said, largely because Western leaders view the war on terror as a finite and winnable battle, while terrorist organizations are prepared to wage war on America for centuries.
And, though she said estimates that the U.S. had either killed or captured 75 percent of Al Qaeda’s leaders are probably true, she added that the group blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks still has a strong leadership team in placed, as evidenced by the group’s ability to support attacks throughout Europe in the past five years.
“The U.S. will be in a long and protracted war of attrition with Al Qaeda,” Rosenthal said.
Michael Bhatia, the panel’s third member, used the discussion to raise philosophical questions about the post-9/11 global environment.
One of the key issues Americans must consider is the role governments should play, and governments’ responsibilities to be honest with their citizens. But Bhatia, a visiting fellow at the Wilson Institute and a doctoral candidate at Oxford University, said Americans are likely to have difficulty moving forward, as they wrestle with a question of ambiguity: Who is the enemy in the war on terror, and to what lengths should the United States go in fighting it?
