Iraq war snuffed out global goodwill toward U.S.

BOSTON — The milk carton I open this morning bears an oddly pedestrian message: Use by 9/11. I am bemused to see this infamous date in such an ordinary context. Somehow I thought it had been removed from the commercial calendar the way hotels removed the number 13 from their floor plans. By now, surely, 9/11 is more an icon than a date.

It's been nearly five years since that September morning when those four planes took off in synchronized suicide. Still, 98 percent of Americans remember exactly where we were when we heard about the terrorist attack on what we have come to call the homeland. More than half of us think of 9/11 several times a week.

The 9/11 commission pinned the success of the attacks on "a failure of imagination." But this summer, when the British police reported on "a plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale," I had no trouble imagining the contact-lens solution, the water bottle, even the lipstick, as agents of carry-on destruction.

But here is something I never imagined five years ago: that America would lose our status as the good guy in the struggle against terrorism. I didn't imagine that our government would squander the righteous role won for us the hard way by victims falling from the Twin Towers and firefighters racing to their deaths.

Al-Qaida was a uniter, not a divider. After the attacks, the whole world seemed to be on our side, with the single, memorable exception of Palestinians dancing in the streets. Some 200,000 Germans marched in solidarity. Flowers arrived at our embassies. Even the reflexively anti-American newspaper Le Monde proclaimed, "We Are All Americans."

When we went into Afghanistan in hot pursuit, the world stayed with us. But then we swung from a just war to a pre-emptive war, from a war on terror to a war of choice, from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein.

"When we crossed the (Iraq) border, there was another great pause, then a transfer of sympathy," an American intelligence officer told Newsweek. "The entire Islamic world took a step to the right." The Bush administration imagined flowers and rose water, shock and awe, mission accomplished. It failed to imagine civil war, and that step to the right.

We went from the Twin Towers to Abu Ghraib, from civil defense to civil war, from innocent passengers to soldiers in Haditha. We blew it all on Iraq. In one poll, Europeans now find us more of a threat to world stability than even Iran. In a survey of 14 countries, none of them believe that removing Saddam made the world safer. And in Iraq itself, only 2 percent of the people now believe we invaded to liberate them from tyranny while 76 percent think we did it "to control Iraqi oil." Imagine that.