Ready to collude with empire?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH at Purana Quila in New Delhi when he addressed Indian businessmen and politicians. - EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP

The Indian elite's lovefest with the U.S. amidst the Iraq quagmire bodes ill for this country's future.

CAN'T the Indian middle class do without a periodic shot of steroids in the form of irrational exuberance or an artificially induced "high" of some kind? It would seem not. Once intoxicated on slogans like "Mera Bharat Mahan", "March into the 21st Century", and "Emerging Superpower", our elite is now high on, of all things, the United States - just as America becomes one of the most unpopular and hated powers of the world.

Indeed, so intense is the suspicion and dislike that the U.S. evokes the world over that Julia E. Sweig, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations in the U.S., calls the 21st century an "anti-American century" in the title of her new book, Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in anti-American Century. Sweig, as mainstream an American nationalist as any CFRer, acknowledges that "since 2000, polls by over a half dozen organisations - from Pew to Zogby, German Marshall Fund to the Guardian, Eurobarometer to Latino-barmetro - have tracked the declining views about America, Americans and foreign policy in every region of the world".

However, Indian opinion, polled by the Pew Research Centre of the U.S. as part of a 15-nation survey with a nearly 17,000-strong sample, marks a stunning break from this global trend. In a poll conducted between end-March and mid-May in just five large Indian cities (the four biggest plus Nagpur) - and probably heavily biased towards the relatively affluent minority of people who own landline telephones - , as many as 56 per cent of respondents said they have a "favourable opinion" of the U.S. government.

Even among Washington's close allies, this proportion is exceeded only in Japan (63 per cent) and just matched by Britain, whom nobody can seriously accuse of having pursued a foreign policy independent of the U.S. for decades. In Germany, France and Spain, the relevant percentages are 37, 39 and 23. In Turkey, another North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) ally, the rating is a pathetic 12 per cent. In Russia, it is 43 per cent and China 47 per cent. In Pakistan, the score (27 per cent) stands at less than half the Indian rating. The average for Muslim-majority countries is an embarrassing 23 per cent (29, if Nigeria is included).

India's 56 per cent approval of the U.S. this year is noticeably lower than its 71 per cent score last year. But seen over a period of time, the trend bears a sharp contrast to the way the rest of the world looks at the U.S. For instance, since 2002, in every single country barring Pakistan, America's rating has slipped, often precipitously. But in India, it has risen from 54 to 56 per cent.

This is not an isolated piece of statistic. It is corroborated and reinforced by the Pew finding that as many as 56 per cent of Indians approve of President George W. Bush's "leadership" and 65 per cent support the U.S.-led global "war on terrorism".

India's confidence rating for Bush is the highest anywhere, even higher than in the U.S. (50 per cent), where his popularity is plumbing the lowest-ever depths (31 to 34 per cent in other recent polls). In contrast to India's elite, only 30 per cent of Britons, 25 per cent of Germans, 18 per cent of French and 7 per cent of Spaniards have "a lot/some confidence in Bush's international leadership".

Pakistan rates Bush at just 10 per cent and Jordan and Egypt at 7 and 8 per cent. Turkey damns his leadership outright - with a 3 per cent approval.

Say the Pew Centre: "Confidence in Bush... has dropped in seven of the 11 countries [for which trend data exists]... The country with the largest drop over the last year, however, is the U.S.": from 62 per cent to 50 per cent. "Bush receives relatively low marks compared to the other European leaders tested on the survey" - Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Angela Merkel, and Vladimir Putin.

Of all these leaders, Bush's marks are, globally, the lowest. Indeed, even in his own country, his confidence rating (50 per cent) is way below Tony Blair's 66 per cent. It is only in India and Nigeria that Bush's rating represents a solid majority - the highest score of all the polled leaders. But in Nigeria, Bush's popularity (52 per cent) is "overwhelmingly driven by the country's Christian population", (approval rating, 82 per cent, compared to 19 per cent among Muslims). So India is truly exceptional.

This is a terrible comment on the naivete, if not downright stupidity, of the Indian urban elite. It lacks the ability to make a discerning distinction between different leaders, and worse, to critically evaluate a man like Bush, with all his arrogance, boorishness and his obvious incomprehension of the complexities of world politics. Even if this rating is at least partly a result of the upbeat reception to Bush's visit to India, that does not speak well of the Indian middle classes' ability to take a long-term view of world leaders.

India's exceptionally positive view of Americans (67 per cent) is even more embarrassing. In the Western European countries surveyed, the average proportion of those expressing a favourable opinion has declined from 68 per cent to 59 per cent since 2002/2003.

In Spain, which experienced a devastating terrorist attack two years ago, Western Europe's worst so far, the rating has slipped from 47 per cent three years ago to just 37 per cent. In India, it has increased from 58 per cent to 67 per cent. India only ranks lower than Japan (82 per cent) in this regard. Evidently, the Indian middle class suffers from Americophilia, suffused with an uncritical approval of the American way of life.

However, what takes the cake is Indian support for the U.S.' "global war on terrorism" - a huge 65 per cent. This betrays an unforgivable lack of political understanding. Support for the Global War On Terror (GWOT) has fallen steeply since 2002/2003 - in Britain, from 69 per cent to 49 per cent, in France (75 to 43), Germany (70 to 47), Spain (63 to 19), Russia (73 to 52), Turkey (30 to 14), and Japan (61 to 26). In China, it stands at a poor 19 per cent, and in Jordan and Egypt even lower.

The Pew poll shows the U.S' war on Iraq and its occupation in extremely poor light. A majority of people the world over see it as a "greater danger to world peace" than Iran with its nuclear programme or the North Korean regime. But in India, only 15 per cent regard the U.S. occupation as a danger to world peace - a proportion less than half of the rating in America (31 per cent), and only a third of the average in Germany, Russia or Spain.

Forty-one per cent of Britons say the Iraq occupation represents a greater danger than the Teheran regime (34 per cent). In Russia, Spain, France and China the relative proportions are 45:20, 56:38, 36:31 and 31:22. It is only in the U.S. and Germany that the proportions are inverse - 31:46 and 40:51. The rest of the world takes an even dimmer view of the occupation. The threats attributed to it exceed those from Iran by four times in Indonesia and seven times in Pakistan. To compound matters further, India's awareness of global dangers is abysmally low.

Even more disturbing, more Indians (41 per cent) believe that the dislodging of Saddam Hussein has made the world "a safer place" than those who do not (34). Contrast this with the ratings in Washington's allies: France (20 against 76), Britain (30 against 60), Germany (21 against 66), Japan (26 to 61) and Spain (7 to 68), not to speak of Russia (17 to 44), China (8 to 44), or Pakistan (11 to 52).

Indian opinion here stands in sharp contrast to Iraq's ground reality: the loss of 100,000 civilian lives (according to The Lancet), terrible and worsening economic conditions, collapse of public services, and a growing and unstoppable insurgency, with frightening levels of violence. A leaked cable from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, signed by the Ambassador, admits that Iraq is a "disintegrating" country in which the real rulers are the militias, and the government.

The U.S. is planning, according to The New York Times, to reduce its 14 combat brigades to just five or six by 2007 - an indication of a "cut-and-run" strategy. Yet, 59 per cent of Indians believe that Washington's efforts "to establish democracy in Iraq will succeed". Less than 40 per cent of Europeans believe that.

The Indian elite has clearly travelled a long, long distance - not just from the days of Non-Alignment and opposition to the U.S.' hegemonic ways, but even from the growing but still weak gravitation towards the U.S. evident just a few years ago. It was only in 2003 (and again in 2004) that a strong across-the-board political consensus and public opinion prevented the Indian government from sending troops to Iraq.

This tectonic shift can only be attributed to medium- and long-term factors such as the proliferation of a consumerist middle class under a Western-oriented neoliberal policy regime, Indian policy-makers' growing moral and political disorientation, and the "Americanisation" of our elite.

What else can explain the contrast between the hostile interaction in Vienna between Bush and the European press at the recent U.S.-European Union summit, and the Indian elite's lovefest with Washington? In Vienna, Bush was hard put to defend himself against the Pew poll, and an even more recent Harris poll which suggests that most Europeans consider the U.S. a bigger threat to world peace than Iran, North Korea or China. He testily said: "I think it's absurd for people to think that we are more dangerous than Iran." Yet, Bush had to concede that Guantanamo Bay must be closed down. He tried to explain the trans-Atlantic difference in attitudes towards GWOT by exaggerating the importance of 9/11: it was "a moment" for Europe. "For us, it was a change of thinking."

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Haditha all cast a heavy shadow over Bush's visit amidst America's sinking world image. Newspaper editorials reflected this.

Said Germany's Die Zeit: "Those who came as liberators, those who wanted to bring the rule of justice... lost their moral credibility in Iraq... America's entire Iraq policy is out of control." France's Le Monde commented acerbically on the recent Guantanamo suicides: "We continue to ask by what heavenly decree America holds itself above the rule of law."

The Indian elite is clearly out of sync with the world. Obsessed with the U.S., it is no longer capable of making an independent appraisal of Washington's global role, itself guided by its thoroughly misbegotten plan to establish a Roman-style world empire and make "Another Century of War" likely - the title of distinguished military historian Gabriel Kolko's excellent book (The New Press, New York, 2002).

The Indian elite has selective amnesia about how Al Qaeda was created through the U.S.' arming of fanatical mujaheedin in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the Washington establishment's partial collusion with the Taliban in the 1990s. It cannot comprehend how America's search for empire is creating a Blowback - the title of Chalmers Johnson's book (Henry Holt, New York, 2000), discussed at greater length in his more recent The Sorrows of Empire (Metropolitan Books, New York, 2005).

The Pew poll shows that only 23 per cent of Indians are even aware of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prison abuses.

These, like Haditha, are part of an unjust war in which soldiers cannot identify the enemy, and the reasons for fighting him.

The short point is this: the U.S. has managed to stoke the forces of fundamentalism and to create a dangerous, unstable, and potentially explosive situation in Iraq through its own policies. Robert Drefuss has ably documented this in his book, Devil's Game: How the U.S. Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan Books, New York, 2005).

Colluding with such an epochally irresponsible and malign power to further destabilise the world is the worst thing anyone can do. Yet, India's elite seems hell-bent on doing just that. If this orientation persists, we can bid goodbye to a sensible foreign policy, and eventually to a steadfast defence of the Indian people's interests.