What the rest of the world wants

By Michael J.W. Stickings

According to a new BBC poll, most people around the world want the U.S. to pull out of Iraq "within a year... Some 39% of people in 22 countries said troops should leave now, and 28% backed a gradual pull-out. Just 23% wanted them to stay until Iraq was safe."

Of course, one imagines that most people around the world also want new episodes of Baywatch. Still, what this poll shows is the vast unpopularity of the Iraq War. Given that unpopularity, America's ongoing presence in Iraq only serves to weaken her reputation around the world, a reputation that was hardly solid to begin with -- solid in a negative way, perhaps, for many and perhaps most people around the world had serious and largely justifiable reservations about America -- her culture, her foreign policy, her imperial nature -- long before the Iraq War sucked America into the quagmire it rapidly became. Those reservations have only intensified on Bush's watch, that is, directly as a result of Bush's policies.

There are many good reasons for America to pull out of Iraq now or at least soon, within a year -- the war as initially waged has already been lost, casualties continue to mount among both U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, America finds herself now in the middle of a civil war, the Iraqi government is corrupt and ineffectual, America's very presence as an occupying force is undermining any chance of success in terms of security and political stability, and so on. World opinion against the war may not be as good a reason as those others, but it does point to one of the consequences of this disastrous war: the collapse of America's image, the positive image that there may have been, around the world, and hence the weakening of one key aspect of America's soft power -- moral authority as a force for good.

America's reputation around the world was pretty bad before the Iraq War. Like the war itself, it's a disaster now. And it will take a good long time for it to recover from the abuse it has taken at Bush's hands.