[free translation from the article in spanish by Joaquin Roy (*) in the "Nueva Mayoria" website]
What is the balance in the United States five years after the experience of 9/11? By large, the immense majority of US citizens are still in the post-traumatic stage, without hardly understanding what has happened. The "thinking" minority is essentially divided among those who already criticized president Bush before the attack and those who have tenaciously opposed the simplistic, interventionist and unilateral thesis.
Apparently under the effects of an extreme "illuminism", the traditional doctrine of the "exception" of the United States has been strengthened, which justifies any policy, no matter how preposterous it might be. In short, the result of the experience is that it is much more difficult to be North-American in today's complex and confused world, and that is not alone the fault of Ben Laden. Damage is also, partly, self inflicted.
For the first months, until the regrettable military intervention in Iraq happened, the North American lived a unique experience by which they protected themselves under a blanket of safety and of rejection of everything which was "foreign". Against what is generally believed, North Americans are essentially isolationist, reticent to any adventures outside their "neighbourhood". The tragedy of the 11-S caught to the full popular mind in dormilona of the end of the Cold War.
Facing the unexplainable, the tragedy was identified as an external product: the terrorists were foreigners, their ideology was foreigner, and foreigner was (and stillis) the phenomenon that president Bush obstinately sold as "the axis of evil". In view of the damage, hardly without time to react, a machinery of war was launched against the new enemy, vague and non identified. The implementation of the reprisal was put in the hands of armed forces that soon became some sort of foreign legion. Armed forces which, each day get more divorced of the North American society, thanks to the professional system. The present situation is by no means comparable to the symbiosis which existed between society and the American army during the glorious experiences of both world wars and those of Korea, and also in Vietnam. Today one realizes sadly that the excesses committed in a jail in Iraq are not the exception, but the rule.
Meanwhile, in spite of the systematic campaign of the White House to keep the guard at specific occasions, the terrorist threat has been lived more as an inconvenience than as a danger. Still today, North American (excluding the families of the military) hardly suffer any impact of the terrorist "blackmail". If one is not obliged to travel weekly, controls at airports are interpreted more as a nuisance than a threat. Getting home, it becomes routine.
Abroad, however, Bush has managed in five years to change hopelessly the ambivalent perception that the world had regarding the United States. Before one could distinguished between what were the "errors of US foreign policy" at certain times, and the fascination for American pop culture in almost the whole planet. When demanding that "those that are not with us are against us", Bush managed to reduce to ashes the headlines of Le Monde of 12 September ("We are all American") as those of the Twin Towers. If, before the 9/11, to be anti-US was the monopoly of the extreme left and some rightwing groups in certain countries like France and nostalgic Spain, nowadays large parts of the Third World and of Europe justifiably oppose Bush's unilateral policy.
In the internal front, Bush looked for shelter in that deep America that was before the spine and the reserve of the best that the country offered, and is now the mirror of a distrustful society, fearful of what is foreign. Those 50% that voted for Bush are exactly those who do not read the books that smash to smithereens the strategies of the "neocons" and who never read the editorials of the reference press (a couple of newspapers of national signification and a dozen of magazines). More than 80% of the US citizens and half of the Congress do not even have passport.
In return, the White House has attacked the means of communication that have traditionally been critical towards the power, inherently to their function, but what this time has been interpreted as a crime of anti-patriotism. The result, therefore, is a divided country with doubts about how to recover when the president leaves the power in two years.
(*) Joaquin Roy is ' Jean Monnet ' Professor and Director of the European Union Centre at the University of Miami jroy@Miami.edu
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