Where America is a 'rogue state'
The World According to Washington: An Asian View
By Patwant Singh
Common Courage, 238 pp., paperback, $16.95
It is no secret that our nation is at a low point in the esteem in which it is held by people in other parts of the world. This recognition has come as a surprise, even a shock, to most Americans, who have always believed that the United States is a beacon to the world, and, as Ronald Reagan put it (embellishing the words of John Winthrop), ''the shining city on the hill." Our current president, not at all lacking in self-esteem either for himself or for the nation he leads, holds to this belief, declaring with some bravado that people everywhere envy our liberty, our democracy.
Patwant Singh is a longtime admirer of Americans who has visited this country, on and off, for 40 years. He has set as his goal to explain to us, as gently as he can but also with unsparing honesty, why we are, at this time in our history, disliked, even hated, by so much of the world. He brings to the subject an impressive background, having written a half-dozen books about India and Asia that were published in his home country of India, as well as in Europe and North America.
He has not hesitated to act on his beliefs, seeing himself as a citizen of the world. Thus, when riots broke out in India in 1984 after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, he visited the president of India (his stature in society there enabled such access) to try to get the government to control the violence. His mission did not succeed, but he has continued to reject a narrow nationalism, to speak and act on behalf of human rights.
Singh reminds us of the long history of Western rule over Asia, going back 400 years, ''transgressions which continue to haunt the world." It is not easy for Americans to accept the fact that this country has followed in the footsteps of the older imperial nations -- Portugal, Spain, France, Holland, Belgium, and England. Indeed, our country in a war for empire expelled Spain from Cuba and the Philippines, and then took over those countries -- indirectly in Cuba, through corporate control and military bases, directly in the Philippines, with a cruel war that resulted in the deaths of 600,000 Filipinos.
World War II saw the defeat of Germany and Japan. It also created an opportunity for the United States to expand its power in Asia, with military bases in South Korea and Japan, with footholds on islands in the far Pacific.
Singh recalls for us a now-forgotten moment in the history of US foreign policy, which during the Cold War became so distorted by fear of Communism that it led to the support of brutal regimes in various parts of the world. The year was 1965, and Indonesia, no longer a Dutch colony, was now ruled by the nationalist leader Sukarno. A military coup by an army general named Suharto was supported by the United States, and was accompanied by the killing of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians.
The Suharto dictatorship became the recipient of American military and economic aid for the next several decades. And the great natural resources of Indonesia were then carved up by US and European corporations.
Singh reminds us -- a necessary reminder as the government and media try to put aside ''the Vietnam syndrome" -- of the millions who died in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as a result of our country's military interventions there. More bombs were dropped on Laos than on all of Japan in World War II. A year after the secret bombing of Cambodia (secret only to the American public, not to the Cambodians) the Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk was deposed in Lon Nol's right-wing coup supported by the United States. It is not far-fetched to suggest that the terrible mass murders that took place in Cambodia under Pol Pot were made possible down the road by US intervention, which removed the stabilizing influence of Sihanouk and left the country in disarray.
Those are troubling accusations, which Singh makes quietly but firmly, and which he supports with impressive documentation. For Americans who have the vision of our country as it came out of World War II -- a defender of freedom, a philanthropist to the world -- it is unsettling to be told that our behavior since that peak of ''the good war" has been that of a rogue state, an invader of other countries, a supporter of tyranny.
The most recent evidence of this is especially troubling: the sanctions against Iraq leading to thousands of deaths; three wars in the Middle East marked by the ferocious bombings of weak nations. There is the failure to join the rest of the world in outlawing land mines, in supporting the Kyoto Treaty limiting dangerous emissions in the environment, in accepting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. There is the insistence on developing new nuclear weapons while hypocritically waxing indignant over other countries acquiring such weapons.
All this is hard medicine to swallow, but unless we do we will remain incurably arrogant, thinking that bombing whatever country we want to into smithereens is done for the good of its people, and that, as our president suggests, God has chosen us to do his will.
Singh does not paint all Americans with one sweep of his brush. He finds among us the equivalent of the dissenters in the Soviet Union, the underground in Nazi-occupied Europe. He admires Robert Byrd's courageous lone voice in the Senate, passionately declaiming against our recent wars, pointing to the dead and maimed on both sides. He admires those who march and protest, who ask our country to make us proud, not ashamed, before the world.
Singh is a friend from another part of the world, deeply troubled by this nation's behavior. He writes elegantly with honest indignation. His is a voice worth listening to.
Howard Zinn is the author of ''A People's History of the United States." 
