Rogue Nation: The America the Rest of the World Knows

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

Peter Scowen’s idea is good, but his research and choice of words need
some fine-tuning. On page 6, he says that “the United States in the
past fifty years has been led by governments that have been as cruel and
inhumane as any that have ever existed.” Most historians can think of
worse.

Scowen decided to write the book after his sister escaped from the
World Trade Center on September 11. He rightly considered it simplistic
to describe the attack as a “battle between good and evil,” and he
wanted to know why Osama bin Laden would want to kill thousands of
Americans. He concluded that the target was neither his sister nor
“the American way of life nor civilization as a whole. Bin Laden’s
target was the United States government.” There is room for doubt on
this. Later on the same page (p. 7), he refers to the hundreds of
Australians subsequently killed in the Bali bombing of 2002. If
al-Qaeda’s quarrel had been limited to the Australian government,
which had helped detach East Timor from Indonesia, surely there would
have been a better target than a nightclub filled with vacationers, many
of whom, presumably, had voted for the opposition. Surely the terrorists
disliked people who wore shorts, drank alcohol, ate pork, and danced to
lively music. Surely this was also the case with the Madrid bombing of
2004. If the terrorists’ quarrel had been exclusively with the Aznar
government, which had sent troops to Iraq, they might have waited a few
days before bombing the Atocha station to see how Spaniards voted. The
socialists were promising to withdraw Spanish soldiers from Iraq if they
won.

Scowen is also unfair to South Koreans, who since 1960 have provided a
Western European standard of living for their 42-million people who live
in a space the size of Scotland. He says that South Korea had a series
of “puppet governments propped up by the U.S.” However, sources at
the Gerald Ford Presidential Archives—a short drive from Scowen’s
Toronto home—confirm that Park Chung Hee, the military President who
led South Korea during the Vietnam War, was no mere puppet of the United
States.

That said, Scowen provides examples from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Iran,
Guatemala, Chile, and Nicaragua to demonstrate that many have good
reasons for disliking successive U.S. governments.