Bridging the partisan gap in foreign affairs
Some suggest the US should set aside political differences to meet the terror threat, even though it's an election year.
The findings of the 9/11 commission on the organization that planned the 2001 terrorist attacks - and now the chilling beheading in Saudi Arabia Friday of American Paul Johnson at the hands of Al Qaeda - are fresh reminders of what the international community is up against.
As one result, some prominent political leaders and international experts are calling for partisan rivals in the US and for the world in general to unite more resolutely - as the West did during the cold war.
But with the US presidential race about to enter high gear, possibly hinging on foreign-policy differences, many observers say the prospects for building on common ground over the next few months will be difficult at best.
Also as the election nears, Bush administration infighting is likely to heat up over which direction foreign policy in a second term would take - between Secretary of State Colin Powell's internationalist stance and the neoconservatives' muscular "America first" approach.
Yet others see the trend toward international cooperation against a common threat advancing despite political differences - though they admit the US campaign may temporarily hide a growing global cooperation. "The campaign around the [presidential] election may obscure what is happening to some extent, but it won't stop this development of a community that is as big as what the West created during the cold war," says Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University.
Finding that the world has already created since Sept. 11 "what is in effect a global antiterrorism department," Mr. Etzioni says the growing international cooperation is "not limited to stopping terrorism" but includes spreading values. Although the Sept. 11 attacks were directed against the US, more than 50 countries have passed or modified laws to enhance their participation, he says.
Among political leaders, one of the more forceful voices for making the global fight against terrorism less an American military fight and more a multilateral "war of values" is Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D) of Connecticut. In a recent speech before the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, the senator warned that Osama bin Laden and other Islamic extremists are determined to establish what he called a "new evil empire" in the Middle East. "What we are fighting for in Iraq and around the world is freedom," says the Democratic 2000 vice-presidential candidate. "What we are fighting against is an Islamic terrorist totalitarian movement which is as dire a threat to individual liberty as the fascist and communist totalitarian threats we faced and defeated in the last century."
Etzioni, the author of a new book entitled "From Empire to Community," maintains that the much-discussed empire-building of the Bush administration "lasted only six months" after the onset of war in Iraq, when the administration realized both in Iraq and elsewhere that it could no longer "go it alone."
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