What other countries are saying...

Tonight the Left Coaster has a nice summary of "9-11: Five Years Later" columns from around the world...well, around Europe, at least.

Germany:

A democratic country protects innocent citizens.

In democracies there is no propaganda, no incitement of hysteria against certain groups of citizens by the press or politicians.

Because a democracy trusts its citizens, it knows that it relies on the consent of its citizenry, because otherwise it doesn't deserve to be called a democracy.

A democratic state controls its secret services, doesn't deploy the army in its own borders, takes fingerprints exclusively from criminals, and doesn't use cameras at tollbooths to film harmless vehicles on the highway.

Democrats, we learned in school, never conduct wars of aggression, but employ peaceful means of cooperation and diplomacy.

That's not just what was explained to me: that's what I believed. No one would have dared insist that this was just a fair-weather opinion that darkened whenever a cloud crossed the sun.

Italy:

The shock of September 11, in fact, had produced unity and cohesion; five years later, we are forced to acknowledge that this capital of goodwill has been dissipated, wasted, and manipulated.

[R]arely has there been such a mismatch between a historic situation and the capacity of the one who had to face it, and that is President Bush. The gravity of the first was faced - alas, alas, alas! - by an intellectually and strategically weak American leader.

He definitely deceived himself, and all of us, too.

Britain:

It is a remarkable turnabout. In the same amount of time that elapsed between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the Treaty of Versailles, in as many months as passed between Germany’s invasion of Poland and D-Day, the US has gone from innocent victim of unimaginable villainy to principal perpetrator of global suffering.

So complete has been this transformation in global sentiment that it is inconceivable now, should America be attacked again, today, that the tragedy would elicit the same response. There would be horror and sympathy in good measure, certainly, from most decent people.

But there would also be much Schadenfreude, and even from the sympathetic a grim, unsmiling sense that America had reaped what it had sown.

Good times.