by Askia Muhammad
White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com)--In the year since Sept. 11, 2001, the United States may have squandered the enormous reservoir of sympathy and even goodwill it received from governments and from world public opinion with its increasingly belligerent policies, according to current and former elected officials, academics, and activists.

"We have yet to learn to pay attention to the underlying causes of terrorism, and are still dealing with (its) effects," warned Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.). "Terrorism cannot be justified but it can be better understood," he said in an interview.

"We should be going in a more humane direction, both at home and abroad," Mr. Jackson said, instead of continuing the heavy-handed super-power posture that had increasingly been alienating even U.S. allies around the world during the first 8 1/2 months of the Bush administration. "Our focus should be on creating more democracy, full employment, education, affordable housing, health care, a safe, clean and sustainable environment, and equality for women," he continued.

During those first months after Pres. George W. Bush took office, he angered the world community when he rejected U.S. support for the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty. He scrapped U.S. commitment to honor the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, as well as the international biological warfare convention. At the same time, some countries in the United Nations had begun to fight back, observers said.

The "resistance" amounted to small, symbolic acts, but they were a beginning, Phyllis Bennis, author of "Before and After: U.S. foreign policy and the Sept. 11 Crisis," a fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, and a former UN correspondent told The Final Call.

The U.S. was kicked off the UN Human Rights Commission and was replaced by Libya, because European countries apparently tired of U.S. "hypocrisy and the double standard," she said. The U.S. also lost its seat on an international drug enforcement panel.

And this country�s scaled-back delegation to the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, the first week of September failed to get European countries to join its walkout. The conference went on to declare the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to be a "crime against humanity," against the clear wishes of Washington policymakers.

But then the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks occurred before all of the delegates and press attending the Durban conference had even left South Africa last year.

"The biggest shift (immediately after) 9/11 was the very abrupt end to the beginning challenge that was emerging internationally towards the kind of unilateral trajectory that the Bush administration had brought in," said Ms. Bennis.

In Africa, shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, where governments and public opinion quickly put aside the lingering resentment throughout the continent dating back to 1998, when the U.S. government showed little or no concern for the 200 Africans killed when this country�s embassies were bombed in Kenya and in Tanzania in favor of an uproar over the 12 Americans killed, Africans showed enormous compassion for the United States.

There were memorial services held throughout Africa. There were financial contributions sent to the United States, including from poor communities like money from a Masai community in rural Kenya. Within one month after Sept. 11, 2001, the government in Senegal even organized a summit of 30 African governments to discuss how to combat international terrorism.

"I think Africans felt, perhaps, tragic as these events are, maybe Americans finally appreciated the vulnerability of all human life that we share in common, and that there are global problems that require global cooperation," Salih Booker, executive director of Africa Action told The Final Call.

"I think there was a hope that the United States would then begin to consider not just its own insecurity, but the insecurity of other nations, and not just from threats like terrorism, but from other global threats that don�t know borders, like the HIV/AIDS pandemic or environmental degradation, or poverty, which in fact is a matter of structural violence.

"Over the past year Africans have become bitterly disappointed that the United States in the end has only been preoccupied with the notion of American security, that the Bush administration has torn-up treaties like the Kyoto Treaty, and the United States has failed to really respond to the most immediate global threat that is killing the most people in the world, which is the AIDS pandemic," said Mr. Booker.

After carefully working to eliminate or to marginalize opposing voices within this country by blurring the boundary between human rights and national security in a way which diminishes Americans� fundamental rights, the Bush administration has pulled the rug out from under the UN�s efforts to have a civil international order that�s based upon principles of law and respect for sovereign nations, said one political scientist.

With its post-Sept. 11 threats to bring about a "regime change" in Iraq by any means necessary, "what (the U.S.) is attempting to do is to open the door to disorder in the international system and arbitrary actions based upon a subjective view, rather than any objective view of the character of any regime," Dr. Ronald Walters, professor of political science at the University of Maryland, said in an interview.

"What it strikes at the heart of is the whole project of the United Nations," he said. "The whole question of respect for sovereignty and all of those international legal principles are at stake in this, and yet nobody�s talking about this.

"The narrowness of the debate has not been able to provide Americans in general with much education. It�s interesting because when we were dealing with 9-11, people said, �why did 9-11 happen?� A lot of it has to do with the ignorance of the American people about international politics and culture," said Dr. Walters.

"The narrowness of this debate has not helped that very much. We need to broaden this discussion in order that Americans do benefit from what has happened to them, so that we can achieve a foreign policy that will make (terror attacks) something in the past, something that we can erase from our memory and the possibility."

Indeed, despite worldwide sympathy for American victims of 9-11 and the tremendous shock it delivered to the U.S. psyche, the "belligerent and divisive voices" in the U.S. government are moving this country away from its historical role in world public opinion as a champion of the underdog and a respected leader in the community of nations, according to former President Jimmy Carter. "Formerly admired almost universally as the preeminent champion of human rights," Mr. Carter wrote in The Washington Post, "our country has become the foremost target of respected international organizations concerned about these basic principles of democratic life."

Still, because there is division in the U.S. government at the highest level about the prospect of invading Iraq, there is an opening for debate, most observers agree.

"That�s when people�s voices can mean more than ever before," said Ms. Bennis. "Activism always matters, but right now it matters more than ever because there is this big split and they�re watching how people are responding. People have got to act now at the agitational level," she warned. "We don�t have long."

Photo: An unidentified foreign woman activist holds a poster during a protest in front of the embassy in Manila, on Sept. 2. Foreign activists from Asian Peace Alliance together with their Filipino counterparts are protesting against the U.S.-led "war on global terrorism." Photo: AFP