By Yasmin Anwar
Advertiser Editorial Writer

Every time I visit Europe, friends and relatives ambush me with a laundry list of sins committed by the United States, as if I were a cult member in need of deprogramming.

Now, as a journalist reared in Europe but working in the United States for more than a decade, I'm acutely aware of the internal debates that rage over domestic and international affairs.

America is a deeply polarized, contradiction-riddled country, I explain to my European compadres. There are libertarians, Christian conservatives, gay Republicans, immigrants from every corner of the globe. Policy-making is often a collision of fiercely competing interests.

But it's that kind of "naive" rationalization that drives Europeans mad. Can't we see that America is scarier than Saddam Hussein, because, as the world's sole superpower, it won't play by anyone's rules but its own?

When Time magazine's Europe edition asked readers what nation posed the greatest threat to world peace, 7.8 percent replied North Korea, 8.9 percent named Iraq and 83.3 percent said the United States.

Euro-U.S. relations weren't nearly so bristly when Bill Clinton was in the White House. The Europeans found his foreign policies largely palatable and his womanizing reassuring. But since George W. Bush took over, the bile comes from all sides.

Why does everyone hate America? I ask my brother, Ralph, who is chairman of his local Labour party in Britain.

It's bad enough, he says, that Bush pulled out of the Kyoto Convention on global warming; never mind that America consumes one quarter of the world's fossil fuel. It's also hypocritical of the United States to preach about human rights and civil liberties when there are more than 600 suspected terrorists detained — possibly unlawfully — at Guantánamo Bay.

Imagine anything as uncivilized as sending teenagers to death row. And then there's America's one-sided support for Israel.

But what really vexes many Europeans is Uncle Sam's harassment of Iraq — not that they have any sympathy for Saddam Hussein. It's the means they object to, not necessarily the end.

There was that brief moment of humility in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks when the world thought America might take a serious stab at facilitating peace in the Middle East. But that was swiftly replaced by muscle-flexing as the Pentagon revved up to take down the Taliban.

When Bush identified an "axis of evil," it dawned on Europeans that America's enemies list extended far beyond the network of terrorists responsible for collapsing the World Trade Center.

Perhaps all this boils down to a fundamental power differential: Europeans want to exercise diplomacy because they're good at it and they don't have a lot of other tools. Meanwhile, America wants to exercise power because, hey, if you've got it, why not take action?

America is isolated, and its wars have been fought on foreign soil since 1865. The war against Iraq, too, will be waged in a faraway land and most of us will watch it on CNN. It's that disconnect that drives Europeans mad.

Yasmin Anwar can be reached via e-mail at yanwar@honoluluadvertiser.com.