The administration of George W. Bush aka The War President has

[bobthedrummer]

actually helped increase anti-Americanism worldwide.

For the first time in my 55 years of life I'm feeling dread, at times, just being an American citizen represented by George W. Bush aka The War President.

Anyone else get those vibes too?

[jgardner]

1. My fear during the election

was that if he won, the rest of the world would take that to mean that we stand behind him. Now he's not just one wingnut in a seat of power, he's a wingnut with the backing of his country, and we (Americans) are responsible for his actions. I'm afraid that's how we're being preceived by the rest of the world.

[Norquist Nemesis]

7. Same here!

And then he and all of the surrogates walk around proclaiming "mandate" doesn't help us either.

[bobthedrummer]

8. That's Karl Rove, "mandate", that's his fucking work.

:grr:

[ClintonTyree]

2. You betcha.................

I will not travel outtside the ocuntry, well, maybe Canada, because I know I'd be a target. Thanks george! You little weenie!

[cdb]

3. Yep.

Seeing pics of dead Iraqi civilians, amputee children, and kids splattered with the blood of their parents give me strong sense of impending doom. I believe that any terrorist acts against the US will now be justifiable due to our behavior. I did not believe these acts were justifiable previous to this war, this *resident.

[bobthedrummer]

4. Most of the world realizes that America has an extremist government.

:argh:

[uppityperson]

5. Majority of USanians and world citizens do.

It is really too bad (understatement). I am in agreement with you, feel bad generally with occassional moments of severe dread.

[Warpy]

6. Constantly

I'm an IRC junkie, and it's an international phenomenon. I generally stick to a more left-leaning channel, so once people from outside the US realize we're not all Bushbots, they settle down and turn into human beings. However, new people generally arrive with massive chips on their shoulders about Bush and the damned foools who put him where he is.

The dread you're feeling isn't because of any threat from outside the US. It's because Fuckwit is hell bent on destroying your future while ruining your present. We know this son of a bitch is going to throw us into a Depression. We know this son of a bitch won't have a clue in the world what to do about it.

[Norquist Nemesis]

9. You're correct about the SOB not having a clue what to do

about it. He's fucking it from here to Kingdom come knowing he doesn't have to have a clue because he won't be here in 3 yrs, 10 months, and a few days.

[Greybnk48]

10. An acquaintance of mine

Spent the holidays in France (mostly Normandy--she's married to a French man). Before she left I asked her to tell anyone and everyone that she encountered that we are all not crazy over here and that Bush's support is propagandized, just to guage their response. I ran into her this past Monday and she said that without exception, everyone she had spoken to knew this. She is a student of mine. I have other international students who have told me the same thing--for what it's worth. And by the way, so far at least, the Bush admin is hated univerally.

[beyurslf]

11. When traveling outside of the US, I would wear a "I promise I didn;t

vote him" shirt or button at all times.

[Chef]

12. War President

The only war he is the war president of is the top-down class war he wages on most of America. In that war, he is most successful.

[seemslikeadream]

13. The War President's souvenirs of a collective action

Even when the president was finally compelled, as the damage to America's reputation everywhere in the world widened and deepened, to use the ''sorry'' word, the focus of regret still seemed the damage to America's claim to moral superiority. Yes, President Bush said in Washington on May 6, standing alongside King Abdullah II of Jordan, he was ''sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families.'' But, he went on, he was ''equally sorry that people seeing these pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America.''

To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern times, ''unfair.'' A war, an occupation, is inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions representative and others not? The issue is not whether the torture was done by individuals (i.e., ''not by everybody'') -- but whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely.

II.

Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is, they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush adminstration's distinctive policies. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, practiced torture and sexual humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives. Add to this generic corruption the mystifying, near-total unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with the complex realities of the country after its ''liberation.'' And add to that the overarching, distinctive doctrines of the Bush administration, namely that the United States has embarked on an endless war and that those detained in this war are, if the president so decides, ''unlawful combatants'' -- a policy enunciated by Donald Rumsfeld for Taliban and Qaeda prisoners as early as January 2002 -- and thus, as Rumsfeld said, ''technically'' they ''do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention,'' and you have a perfect recipe for the cruelties and crimes committed against the thousands incarcerated without charges or access to lawyers in American-run prisons that have been set up since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to ''suspects'' in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen in a book just published, ''Photographing the Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0524-09.htm