Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

OXFORD (Britain) - The stockpile of global sympathy and goodwill for the United States after Sept 11 has dissipated - replaced by a rising anti-American sentiment that has turned into a contagion now spreading across the globe.

Anti-Americanism is no longer limited to religious and radicals terrorists who resent the US, but is infecting even the US' most important allies in Europe.

No longer sympathetic with a post-Sept 11 America, protestors in London vent their anger against US foreign policy on Iraq and other world issues. USA TODAY Analysts blame this on a series of new US policies widely considered to be selfish and unilateral, including President George W. Bush's plans to topple Iraqi government.

Here in London, in virulent prose, newspapers criticize the US Politicians and attack American foreign policies ferociously, especially the plans to attack Iraq.

And regular citizens launch into tirades with American friends and visitors. What happened, many Americans are wondering, to all that global goodwill? 'It was squandered,' said Mr Meghnad Desai, director of the Institute for Global Governance at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a member of the House of Lords.

'America dissipated the goodwill out of its arrogance and incompetence. A lot of people who would never, ever have considered themselves anti-American are now very distressed with the US.' Recent US policies - stretching back to Mr. Bush's refusal last year to support the treaty on global warming - have drawn flak for being selfish and unilateral.

Many are enraged by Mr. Bush's support for steel tariffs and farm subsidies, his refusal to involve the US in the new International Criminal Court and what is widely regarded abroad as one-sided support for Israel and its prime minister, Ariel Sharon.

The rash of corporate malfeasance and the blanket arrest of terrorism suspects after Sept 11 has given further fuel to critics, who say the US preaches democracy, human rights and free enterprise - but doesn't practice them.

In a recent article in Policy Review magazine, Mr. Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said the divide between the US and Europe was getting wider than ever as they went their different ways - one with a foreign policy based on unilateralism and coercion, the other based on diplomacy and persuasion.

Europeans, he said, had 'come to view the United States simply as a rogue colossus, in many respects the biggest threat to their pacific ideal'.

In Germany recently, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder launched his re-election campaign by denouncing what he derisively called Mr. Bush's proposed military 'adventures' in Iraq.

In Britain, the new head of the Anglican Church and other bishops circulated a petition proclaiming any attack on Iraq illegal and immoral.

Mr. Peter Peterson, chairman of the US Council for Foreign Relations, said: 'Around the world, from Western Europe to the Far East, many see the US as arrogant, hypocritical, self-absorbed, self-indulgent and contemptuous of others.