Popularity of the US around the world

WASHINGTON (AP) - In the eyes of much of the world, this is America: an inconsiderate lone wolf that has really good entertainment but really bad values, that wants war with Iraq just to get oil but still should remain as the only superpower on Earth.


In a broad international survey released Wednesday, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that the United States is falling out of favor in 19 of 27 countries where a trend could be identified.


The dislike was especially striking in Muslim countries. Seventy-five percent of those surveyed in Jordan had an unfavorable opinion of America, as did 69 percent of Egyptians and Pakistanis and 59 percent of Lebanese. In Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Senegal, Turkey and Lebanon, the vast majority said they oppose the U.S.-led war on terrorism.


But ill will toward the United States was also found in supposedly friendly nations like Canada, Britain and Germany.


"The biggest headline is the slipping image of the United States, not simply that we\'re not liked in the Muslim world," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "But there is still a great reserve of good will toward the United States."


The surveys in 44 countries were conducted by established survey organizations in each country between July and October, with polls done by phone in eight of the most developed countries and face-to-face in the others. The error margins ranged from plus or minus 2 percentage points to 4.5 points, depending on the sample size.


A generally favorable view of America is held in 35 of the 42 countries that took part in the survey. Among Russians, U.S. popularity has surged 24 points, from 37 percent two years ago to 61 percent today. Similarly, 77 percent of Nigerians and 85 percent of Uzbeks had pro-U.S. views, up 31 percent and 29 percent respectively.


The most common criticisms of the United States are that it acts by itself, it pushes policies that widen the gap between rich and poor nations, and it doesn\'t do enough to solve the world\'s problems.


Americans don\'t necessarily agree.


Seventy-five percent of Americans polled said U.S. foreign policy is considerate of others. But next door, only 25 percent of Canadians said America is a considerate world citizen. Perhaps surprisingly, U.S. foreign policy was deemed considerate by 53 percent of respondents in Germany, a harsh critic of President Bush (news - web sites)\'s position on Iraq.


World citizens admire American technology and culture, but not the spread of U.S. ideas and customs; 54 percent of Canadians, 67 percent of Germans, 71 percent of the French and 84 percent of Egyptians said it would be bad to spread American ideas and customs.

But Canadians — 77 percent of them — also said they like American music, movies and TV. It was much the same for Venezuela (78 percent), Poland (70 percent), Japan (74 percent), Ivory Coast (84 percent) and Great Britain (76 percent).

U.S. officials have tried to do something about America\'s image problem abroad. The White House established an office of "global communications" to provide in-depth explanations of President Bush\'s foreign policy.

Madeleine Albright (news - web sites), secretary of state during the Clinton administration and chair of the Pew survey, said the fact that the United States is the world\'s only superpower may have led to the results.

"In many ways, we are viewed as the rich guy living on the hill," Albright said. "We have seen this coming since the end of the Cold War."

Most of the people surveyed said they don\'t want the world to again have more than one superpower. Even in Russia, 53 percent said they believe the world is safer with just one.

In Germany, the percentage of people who hold a favorable view of the United States fell 17 points over two years. In 1999/2000, 78 percent of Germans considered the United States favorably, this year 61 percent.

In Turkey, which is being actively courted for help in a possible war with Iraq, pro-U.S. views dropped from 52 percent to 30 percent.

Sentiments were similar in Argentina, where 34 percent saw the United States in a good light, compared to 50 percent two years ago. In Indonesia and the Slovak Republic, favorable ratings fell 14 points.

Large percentages of Muslim respondents in several countries said they believe suicide bomb attacks are a justifiable defense of Islam. This was especially so in Lebanon, where 73 percent supported this belief.

Also, 21 countries rated the news media as a good influence, while the military was seen as a good influence in 15 countries. Five gave the top rating in influence to religious leaders. Only one, Ivory Coast, said the national government is the top influence.

In six countries — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Turkey and the United States — the majority said Iraq poses a great or moderate threat to the world, and Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) must go.

Only 22 percent of Americans said oil is the United States\' real motive for pursuing war with Iraq, but 44 percent of the British, 75 percent of the French, 54 percent of Germans and 76 percent of Russians held that view.

When it comes to conditions at home, Uzbeks and the Vietnamese were the happiest of all. Sixty-nine percent said they are satisfied with the state of their countries. In Peru and Argentina, only 3 percent of respondents said they are pleased with the way things are at home.

They don\'t even mention Australia, one of, if not, the US\'s most steadfast allies at the moment.

Ask any Australian and most would, if not all, would support the US. Not necessarily the way Bush is dealing with everything but certainly that something needs to be done.

Originally posted by GigaShadow


But ill will toward the United States was also found in supposedly friendly nations like Canada, Britain and Germany.

well thats the price you pay for being the big rich kid on the block.

that and your foreign policy Suck’s Da big one

[CHIZZY]

They didn\'t mention whether those countries liked all the foriegn aid money we dump on them over and over again. Ask those rat bastard cowards, the French, if they liked being saved from Germany TWICE, and us rebuilding their country TWICE. We still haven\'t been repaid for either. We look the other way for 50-60 years thinking "well, it\'s good diplomacy, at least we\'ll always have an ally in Europe we can count on..." They\'re nothing but complete scumbags.

As a European citizen I resent what Chizzy said.

Come on now, we\'re all in the same boat. We\'re f*cking western countries for Christ\'s sake and we\'re members of the UN, NATO and whatnot. I don\'t see the need to \'battle\' eachother.

[§ôµÏG®ïñD]

Originally posted by ##RaCeR##
They don\'t even mention Australia, one of, if not, the US\'s most steadfast allies at the moment.

Ask any Australian and most would, if not all, would support the US. Not necessarily the way Bush is dealing with everything but certainly that something needs to be done.

Please don\'t speak for australia racer... Thank you.

I speaking for Australia, not Australians.

Originally posted by ##RaCeR##
I speaking for Australia, not Australians.

as in the Goverment ?

in that case we have something in common

My goverment constantly kisses Bush\'s hairy ass on a daily basis...even though we the British people what the Bush Admin to go to hell and Stop dragging us into conflicts

[§ôµÏG®ïñD]

umm yea.... australia right.

Ask any Australian and most would, if not all, would support the US.

Get of the drugs.

and i guess you\'ve asked 25 million aussies right?

Yes, as in the government. John Howard and Bush are like buddy buddy beyond belief.

[Bobs_Hardware]

You said ask "any" Australian.

Originally posted by §ôµÏG®ïñD
umm yea.... australia right.




Get of the drugs.

and i guess you\'ve asked 25 million aussies right?

I know I didn\'t imply it, but it was more so what the government is telling Australia. That Australians support the US automatically simply because the government does.

They hate us because they can\'t be us.

I don\'t see boatloads of Americans heading toward Europe to get away from the US government.

Here\'s a long read but a good one.

By the way, If I were the Prez I would let all you European countries that give us bull crap hang in the breeze.

Ace

Anti-Americanism Redux Abroad
By Arnold Beichman
The Washington Times | November 20, 2002


Salman Rushdie recently wrote that America was "facing an ideological enemy that may turn out to be harder to defeat than militant Islam: that is to say, anti-Americanism, which is presently taking the world by storm." Mr. Rushdie should know, since he contributed to this storm.

But Mr. Rushdie is right. The United States is today the target of an extraordinary wave of West European anti-Americanism greater perhaps than previous waves that crested between 1952 and 1974 — during the days of McCarthyism, the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War.

For many European intellectuals and mediacrats, democratic America has become the Rogue State No.1. Millions and millions of dollars have been invested by the U.S. in varied cultural projects with the hope of reducing this hostility. To no avail. There is an insufficiently discussed or understood reason for this continuing hate syndrome against the United States that I will allude to in a moment.

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, with democracy in the ascendant and the Berlin Wall a pile of rubble, one would have thought the European intellectual left would honor the country whose military preparedness and economic aid had helped liberate Central Europe from a Soviet yoke. On the contrary. Even before the Iraq crisis and the September 11 catastrophe, European anti-Americanism, especially in British and French left-liberal media, was boiling away.

Hostility to the United States seems to have risen to a new high because of American policy towards Iraq and the possibility of an American invasion seeking the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Even the unanimous Security Council vote demanding Saddam open Iraq to inspection hasn\'t diminished this tide of anti-Americanism. This tide is so powerful that had President Bush announced a year ago that he would not under any circumstances invade Iraq, you can be sure Europe, with American peaceniks joining in, would be denouncing him in protest parades for perpetuating the rule of Saddam Hussein, that bloody tyrant, in order, naturally, to protect Texas oil interests.

Forgotten is the aftermath of September 11 when the European press announced, "We are all Americans now." Actually even before the Iraq crisis, Western European intellectuals had invented another monster — globalization — with which to fan the flames of anti-Americanism. Articles have appeared in the British press that would have you believe America, the most democratic country in the world, resembles Nazi Germany. A few Sundays ago , the British weekly Observer published a Goebbelsian Big Lie article by Gore Vidal headlined: "Gore Vidal claims \'Bush junta\' complicit on September 11."

There are a number of theories seeking to explain the continued anti-Americanism in Western Europe directed at delegitimizing American foreign policy, no matter its thrust.

Few of these theories seeking to explain anti-Americanism have dealt with what I consider to be the driving force of this extraordinary hostility: the persistence into the 21st century of a Marxist ideological infrastructure that still dominates European culture. Marxism may have been repudiated by a global plebiscite, but European intellectuals continue to abominate the biggest capitalist power in the world. Marx predicted the inevitable collapse of capitalism because of its so-called internal contradictions, and here, in defiance of that "scientific" prediction, is the United States bigger than ever, more powerful than ever.

"Anti-Americanism early became a Marxist theme," Lewis Feuer has written, "for America offered a social alternative that threatened to reduce Marxist modes of thought and feeling into irrelevancies and absurdities."

While Marxism is on its last legs (except in American academic circles) as an acceptable solution to politico-economic problems, its afterglow is still part of West European culture. Its afterglow is energized by the nostalgic faith in vestigial Marxism as expressed by George Lukacs, one of its most revered theoreticians and a famous communist intellectual. He wrote that "Marxism as a general theory of society and history, no longer exists, that it came to an end sometime ago. We stopped with Lenin. After him there has been no Marxism." Despite this seeming obituary, he declaimed that even if Marx\'s propositions were proven false, even if every empirical prediction of Marxism were invalidated, he would still hold Marxism to be true and he would still be a Marxist. Marxism forever, dead or alive. Lukacs irrationalism runs in the European bloodstream.

This Marxisant anti-Americanism finds sympathetic echoes in Continental Europe, especially in Germany, and in the British Labor Party and is driven by a social-democratic credo which is wary of a free market economy, like that of the United States, especially with a Republican president at the helm. And above all, anti-Americanism exists among European elites because American capitalism has demonstrated a staying power that cannot be found anywhere else in the world even with all its Enron-esque thieveries.

And you can be sure that President Bush\'s midterm election victory will prove to European intellectuals that their culture faces an imminent takeover from "Macdisco," the Unholy Three — MacDonald-Disney-CocaCola.

There is little we can do about this anti-Americanism in Western Europe although I suppose the State Department should be encouraged to hold behind-closed-door conferences on anti-Americanism as it did last September. Good luck.
     
Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times.

[§ôµÏG®ïñD]

howard is a american kissarse.  He reminds me of a little weasel..

The government doesn\'t = 25 million aussies. There\'s NEVER been any kinda voting on backing up americas war against iraq idea.

Simple statement.


PROVE IT.

Originally posted by ##RaCeR##
Yes, as in the government. John Howard and Bush are like buddy buddy beyond belief.

more like Tony Blair , John Howard and Bush in a 3 some.

its sickening

we the UK people have no grievance with Iraq.

But as usual the “almighty US” can’t go it alone unless it has British Troops to lead the way.

so we get dragged into this hell thanks to the fact that Captian 1 brain Cell has cold feet.