A Bad Year for Empire (JIM LOBE)

[laststeamtrain]

A Bad Year for Empire
Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 22 (IPS) - For those who believed that the precise and overwhelming demonstration of U.S. military power in Afghanistan and Iran would "shock and awe" the rest of the world -- and particularly Washington's foes and aspiring rivals -- into accepting its benevolent hegemony, 2006 was not a good year.

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Of course, the most important revolt against the Bush administration's Washington's globocop aspirations took place here at home last month when voters handed Democrats control of both houses of Congress in mid-term elections in which Iraq and foreign policy, by virtually all accounts, played the decisive role.

While the warhawks predictably claimed that the results reflected more the public's lack of confidence in the way Bush had carried out policy than on the policy itself, a battery of polls in both the run-up to the election and immediately afterward found that that a large majority of citizens believe the administration's belligerent unilateralism had made the United States -- as well as the rest of the world -- less, rather than more, safe.

Nearly eight in 10 respondents in one survey sponsored by the influential Council on Foreign Relations and designed by legendary pollster Daniel Yankelovich said they thought the world saw the U.S. as "arrogant", and nearly 90 percent said such negative perceptions threaten national security.

"It's not just a matter of (wanting to be) well-loved or nice," said Yankelovich.

Whether the implications of these findings, as well as the elections results -- not to mention the foreign policy balance sheet of 2006 -- will be absorbed by Bush and his senior policy-makers in 2007, however, remains very much in doubt.

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http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35951
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A Bad Year for Empire?

Good. The US shouldn't BE an empire. I want the republic back & the patrician traitors brought to justice.