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Sept. 11 Changes U.S. Role in World
Monday, September 9, 2002
The Associated Press

“Stereotypes of the United States as arrogant, self-indulgent, hypocritical, inattentive, and unwilling or unable to engage in cross-cultural dialogue are pervasive and deeply rooted,” concluded a U.S. Council of Foreign Relations study. The many mornings since Sept. 11 have awakened many Americans to more than that -- to the interdependence of an ever-smaller world, to their own dependence, to their vulnerability, especially in energy.

The soul-searing spectacle of a September morning changed the way America looks at the world. Now a year of war, of ultimatum, of overwhelming power is changing the way the world sees America.

“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” President Bush told other governments in the first days of national shock a year ago, when Congress rushed through $40 billion for a war on terrorism and the U.S. military soon embarked, in Afghanistan, on its longest combat engagement since wading ashore in Vietnam almost four decades earlier.

For America, the counterstrike to Sept. 11 shattered old barriers and opened dangerous new horizons.

It landed U.S. forces in former Soviet territory for the first time, as a U.S.-Russian partnership grew stronger. It put American military teams into unfamiliar combat zones on the fringes of the Islamic world. And it produced a sharper U.S. tilt toward Israel, even as George Bush held out the promise of an independent Palestine.

Along the way, the forceful U.S. moves made enemies and complicated the support of friends. A wider war would mean still deeper complications.

“By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem. We reveal a problem,” Bush told graduating West Point cadets nine months after Sept. 11.
(More: Israel Daily News Source)
2002 © The Associated Press.

Dan