Critical Mass: Major antiwar protests, like this one in Pakistan, are commonplace
Prajim Praiwet thinks he knows all about the U.S. and its wars. The 55-year-old Thai rice farmer remembers four decades ago when the jungles of his home province, Nakhon Phanom, were a key staging ground in American-backed efforts to eradicate communism in Indochina. Then a teenager, he watched in despair as a proxy war between the U.S. and China terrorized his little village: U.S.-funded Thai troops tortured and killed locals, while the communists responded by beheading Thai soldiers. "America will bully other countries because it is strong," says Prajim. "Everyone else will suffer."
This time around, the battleground is thousands of miles away in Iraq. But the weathered Thai peasant speaks for many Asians who appear surprisingly unified both in their condemnation of unilateral U.S. action in the Middle East and their worry that this faraway fight could have very local repercussions. Their fears are manifold. Asian investors worry that their reeling stock portfolios will be further ravaged by war, while businessmen fret that further oil price hikes will clobber their export-led economies. Political leaders, meanwhile, are wary of Islamic extremists interpreting an attack on Saddam Hussein as yet another call to arms, triggering more terrorist actions in Asia and even radicalizing Muslim moderates. But beyond these economic and political anxieties, there is also a moral component to Asia's concern: the U.S., its critics argue, hasn't sufficiently justified an engagement in Iraq, and Washington's go-it-alone approach is proof of an arrogant and increasingly aggressive superpower willing to ignore global opposition. "There is no difference in the way Hindus and Muslims think on Iraq," says Anand Varadhan, an Indian bank employee in the Hindu holy town of Varanasi. "The American argument for war just makes no sense."
That critical message was voiced with mounting urgency last week as antiwar demonstrators flocked to peace protests across the region from Rawalpindi to Taipei. The largest gathering took place in the eastern Indonesian city of Surabaya, where 700,000 citizens—more than the entire population of Washington, D.C.—came together to condemn the march toward war. Some top Asian leaders, such as Japan's Junichiro Koizumi and Indonesia's Megawati Sukarnoputri, have remained relatively circumspect about the Iraq crisis, mostly reiterating European and African calls for a United Nations-led attempt to disarm Saddam. But there has also been plenty of Yankee-bashing in state-monitored Asian newspapers. Opined the New Straits Times in Malaysia: "[This] is about the imposition of a Pax Americana on the Middle East. All the justifications—democracy, human rights and regional stability—echo the double-talk used by 19th-century European imperialists, who conquered and plundered Africa and Asia." Seconded the China Business Times, the mainland's leading economic journal: "We are facing a more and more aggressive America, an America that frequently wields its fists."
America may be used to catcalls from the French or the Germans, but the heatedness of the antiwar debate in Asia has caught the Bush Administration by surprise. After all, Pax Americana in Asia was supposed to mean peace, stability and economic resurrection. The U.S. military has stationed 37,000 troops in South Korea to keep the divided peninsula from self-destructing; it has sent thousands of special operatives and soldiers to Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Philippines to help root out terrorism; its aircraft carriers have on occasion plied the waters near the Taiwan Strait to bolster an uneasy peace between Taipei and Beijing. For the most part, these interventions have been viewed as benign. So it was no surprise, perhaps, that during the last Gulf War—while skeptics in Europe grumbled that the conflict was about oil, not democracy—the U.S. enjoyed broad support from Asians, who saw a well-meaning superpower determined to free a tiny Islamic kingdom from Iraqi aggressors.
But over the past decade, America the benevolent has morphed in many Asian minds into America the bully. Granted, Asians still love their Big Macs, their Levis, their Harvard M.B.A.s. If given the chance, many Asians would happily leave their homelands for a life in New York or Los Angeles. Nevertheless, anti-American sentiment in Asia is brewing far stronger than a Starbucks espresso. Southeast Asian economies still hung over from 1997's financial crisis continue to blame the International Monetary Fund—which they see as a puppet of Washington—for exacerbating their fiscal woes. In China, an increasingly nationalist populace is clamoring for the country to stand up against what some dub "American hegemony." South Korean students too young to remember the Korean War have taken to protesting the presence of the U.S. military, incited by an event last summer in which a U.S. Army armored personnel carrier struck and killed two Korean schoolgirls. Even the Japanese are standing up against America in increasing numbers, after decades of obediently hewing to Washington's line. A long-simmering movement to scrap Japan's 1945 U.S.-mandated constitution that prevents the country from having an offensive military is bubbling anew, at the same time as peace protesters are filling Tokyo's streets. The two factions might come from opposing camps, but their sentiments add up to one message: America, don't meddle where you don't belong.
Nowhere is anti-U.S. feeling stronger than in the Islamic crescent of South and Southeast Asia, where political leaders worry that a moderate Muslim majority could be radicalized by a Gulf conflict. Many Muslims regard a war against Saddam as an attack on innocent Iraqi Muslims, a suspicion intensified by members of the Bush Administration who in the past used words such as "crusade" to define the potential hostilities. "We see a war on Iraq as an assault on Muslims," says Moulana Obaidul Haq, the chief imam of the state-run Baitul Mukarram Mosque in Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka. "We want to see an end to all the enemies of Islam."
