World Tribune.com: Down with America and make way for the morally superior Lilliputians

From London to Tokyo, it is open season on the U.S. Whether a fatuous Italian journalist from a newspaper notoriously linked to Rome’s intelligence community mongering on the pre-Iraq War failures to a salivating National Public Radio bimbo, or another in the campaigns to rekindle and exploit Japan’s World War II transgressions in order to derail effective collective security in East Asia, it’s heyday for the Lilliputians:

Turkish generals, just young enough not to have played their comrades’ duplicitous role in World War II, threaten to invade Iraq and destabilize the Kurdish areas which they charge — probably correctly — lend support to the separatist movement inside their country based on legitimate grievances Ankara has not effectively addressed militarily or politically for a half century. Anything to get away from the disappointments of growing rejection by the European Union, anything to avoid a split in the ruling AKP Islamicist party, anything to avoid the coming crunch on selection of a chief of state who might not be a reincarnation of the current fervent secularist.

Kazahhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose multidirectional foreign policy spins for balance from Moscow to Beijing to Washington, appears backing away [this week] from massive investments to transport his growing oil and gas exports to market through the Caspian-Mediterranean corridor Washington ingenuity [and subsidized private enterprise] has built. With American power idling in Afghanistan and Central Asia, he sees it time to look back to Russia [and over his shoulder to half his population which is Slav] and away from Washington-sponsored projects to get out from under Moscow’s skirts.

Pakistan’s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf prepares for a Beijing fix to the Pakistan-Chinese alliance, after an additional U.S. $350 million to aid his historic mission to bring the tribals along the Afghanistan border to heel. With a recent American ambassador to India pushing all-out tech transfer to India, despite Washington’s reassurances on the off-again, on-again 50-year U.S.-Pak alliance, Islamabad sees the necessity of tweaking it further in the face of growing Islamicist and “democratic” threats to the regime.

New Delhi of the forked diplomatic tongue still plays its Iran card, not only attempting my enemy’s enemy is my friend politics against Pakistan’s exploding western Baluchistan province but in defiance of Washington’s effort to put the economic screws to Tehran to end its nuclear weapons drive. The balance of forces means the Indians will not make the trade-off of unrestricted access to a mushrooming U.S. market for a joint effort to block a rogue regime.

A Kiwi from the Down Under country luxuriating under the American nuclear shield without dirtying its hands with participation in the grimy real world, leads the charge against Paul Wolfowitz’ peccadillos at the World Bank. It was long the American preserve among the United Nations’ corrupt “development” apparati but a place where such scandals in the past had been kept under the blanket.

Indonesian politicians wink and nod at terrorist “religious” leaders who in 2002 masterminded the slaughter of innocents in Bali and who are an integral part of the growing Southeast Asian Islamofascist network. And there are indications for purely domestic political reasons, Jakarta is giving less than complete cooperation to the Filipinos — encadred with American special forces — chasing down Indonesian terrorists in their southern islands. All this despite a kiss and make-up [and absolution for past human rights violations] between U.S. and Indonesian military from whom the former general President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was drawn.

There is a plethora of more examples in the nitty-gritty of the U.S.’ international bilateral relations throughout Asia of tongues being stuck out in sometimes infantile defiance of Washington policy.

The combination of the disaster which has befallen American policymakers in Iraq, the media hype of the disaster, the spectacle of America’s No. 3 running amuck in the Mideast in defiance of the executive’s prerogatives to make foreign policy — are all having their effect. But overhanging it all is speculation the U.S. is pulling another Vietnam, walking away from a dramatic and bitter ideological confrontation with its enemies as withdrawal of support from the Saigon government signaled in 1972.

The intricacies of international diplomacy — seen on both the idiot left and the idiot right as conspiracies — can often be only partially untangled long after the fact by the historians. Above all, the concentration on one theater in the vast complex of national security interests of the American behemoth and the 300 million people for whom it now stands in, can often distort more important longer term issues. How, for example, the U.S.’ Western European allies are to deal with their growing problem of Moslem minorities and their relationship to the worldwide terrorist networks may be of longer term significance than most of what is being reviewed by talking heads in the Washington think tanks at the moment.

But what is very certain from any examination of history — whether it is the Falklands War’s impact on Britain just a decade ago or the fallout of the terrorist attack of 9/11 — is the overall mood these actions engendered in the flow of events in their aftermath.

The erosion of American prestige and ability to influence world events — which the chattering classes ascribe to a lack of Bush Administration’s collaboration with its feckless European allies — is far more the anticipation of defeat in Iraq which lies in the air. Those who argue defeat in Iraq would likely lead to more aggressive attacks by the victorious terrorist pack on the U.S. elsewhere — perhaps even in the homeland — are probably correct.

But not to be forgotten is possible greater effect: the spectacle of U.S. defeat in Iraq would feed all those tendencies around the world which threaten peace and stability for which American power is the keystone in a world of pygmies. These signs of the loss of American prestige are the portent of what such a catastrophe would bring.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.