The wonderful American world of informers and <i>agents provocateurs </i>
With barely a debate, the Bush doctrine has set out a radically new-and dangerous-role for the United States.
An antiwar movement is finally, thankfully stirring. But the ideology-bound leaders of that movement are steering it away from the millions of Americans whose concerns and ambivalence might fuel it.
Anti-Americanism is an emotion substituting for an analysis, a morality, an ideal, even an idea about what to do.
Instead of intelligent criticism of Israel, the worst crackpot notions that circulate through the violent Middle East are also roaming around America, and if that wasn't bad enough, students are spreading the gibberish.
What links Arundhati Roy and Edward Said is what demarcates anti-Americanism, that peculiar empire of the one-eyed, from reasoned political opposition to US policies. Real, not gestural, politics must worry about the breadth of the brush.
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