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American backlash over Europe's harsh treatment of Bush By Toby Harnden

THE hostility and ridicule heaped on President Bush during his visit to Europe has provoked a backlash in the United States, with many condemning Continental politicians as anti-American and hypocritical.

Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, said Mr Bush had "done well" in Europe and the criticism he had faced had caused a "rallying around the president" even among his political opponents.

American newspapers have generally judged Mr Bush's first European trip since winning the White House a success, in part, as William Safire of the New York Times argued, because European expectations were "so contemptuously low".

The European reaction to Mr Bush has been perceived as so vitriolic that it has forced even some of his liberal critics to defend their president and reassess whether Europe is as tolerant and sophisticated as they had previously believed.

American reporting of European opinion has fanned the flames because it has tended to select the most extreme views. The Guardian description of the Bush White House as a "presidency of dunces" has often been presented as a consensus view. Americans have been particularly indignant about European attitudes to the death penalty and the Kyoto global warming treaty.

The Left-leaning New Republic said: "The reason European nations eschew the death penalty isn't that they're more civilised, it's that they're less democratic. Large swathes of the European public actually support the death penalty. The real continental divide is noblesse oblige - in Europe, elites are united against the death penalty, and parliamentary systems allow them to ban it even in the face of the popular will."

Mr Safire, a conservative, wrote witheringly: "Ex-Trotskyites in France consider us barbarians for imposing the death penalty on a mass murderer, though more prisoners in French jails committed suicide in the past year than were executed in the US."

In the New York Times, Gregg Easterbrook, a New Republic editor, stated that President Chirac, Chancellor Schroder and Wim Kok, the Dutch Prime Minister, were guilty of "breaking the taboo that heads of state do not air disagreements during state visits".

Such slights, he argued, were "intended to inflate the European Union's collective ego" and to create a "common antagonist" in Mr Bush to fill the void left by the demise of the Soviet Union. "Trying to build up Europe by acting outraged against America has become the European national sport on many fronts."

Michael Kelly of the Washington Post said European public opinion as represented in the European press was "mostly limited to elite opinion". This was nothing new because "for decades this elite class has generally cherished a sneering and jingoistic contempt for America and American values".

Mr Kelly, like many commentators across the political spectrum, drew attention to the gap between European rhetoric about global warming and lack of action in implementing the Kyoto protocol. "Bush did not kill Kyoto," he said. "He buried its mouldering corpse."

On missile defence, the conservative Wall Street Journal noted that much of the opposition to Mr Bush's proposals came from centre-Left governments that had "trouble accepting that opposing points of view are at all legitimate".

But, despite the "widely accepted and unfortunate culture of intolerance for political diversity promoted in Western Europe", Mr Bush had been successful in winning over President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, and Jose Maria Aznar, the Prime Minister of Spain.

White House aides said yesterday they believed Mr Bush's "wonderful" meeting with President Putin could lay the foundations of a new relationship.

They said they were heartened by Mr Putin's comment that there was a possibility of a "constructive development" on the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which Mr Bush wants to abandon.

-- Anonymous, June 17, 2001