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Updated Friday, August 22, 2008 0:00 am TWN, By Khalil Ahmad, Special to The China Post

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After Musharraf, U.S. needs to win over people’s hearts

U.S. foreign policy, however, has never been constrained by its founding principles, not least because Americans have little interest in the outside world — that’s the business of government. But with instant communication, contradictions between its domestic virtues and its imperial excesses are visible, as they were not when, for example, the U.S. sent Marines to independent Hawaii in 1893 to “enforce neutrality” by reinforcing a coup d’etat by foreigners against the monarch.

With the new language of spreading democracy and nation-building, even if such ventures as Iraq and Afghanistan have brought these fine notions into ridicule, that disconnection between rhetoric and reality is all the more stark.

Readers will no doubt cite the role of the U.S. in World Wars I and II as shining examples of principled warfare, but in both cases the U.S. only came to the aid of its friends when it was attacked. By the same token, the revolting Stalinist Soviet Union was also on the Allied side in WWII because it, too, was attacked (by its former ally), so virtue was not an issue. The saner Americans must realize that they are not going to win this war against Islamist extremism and its allies the way they are going about it now. Envy, religious fanaticism and animosity towards the U.S. are only fanned by the blatant contradiction in its policies. Unless it is remedied, nothing is going to make any difference.

But America’s abundant wealth means that even the massive cost of the invasion of Iraq, more than US$100 billion a year and rising, is less than two percent of the GDP, less than the percentage cost of the Vietnam War, so it could go on for years. Whether the U.S. can sustain the casualties, falling military morale and political losses of an endless quagmire are another matter, factors that could lead to a sudden withdrawal and humiliation as in Vietnam.

In order to again become an emblem of personal freedom for the oppressed of this earth, the U.S. needs to go back to basics, following its own Charters of Freedom so beautifully displayed in Washington D.C. Its foreign policy needs to win the hearts of foreign peoples, not their heads of governments. That’s the only way to save America, and the rest of us, from its imperial hubris.

Khalil Ahmad is founder and Executive Director of the Alternative Solutions Institute (Lahore), www.asinstitute.org, Pakistan’s first free-market think-tank.

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