Why is the world so mad at us?

Re “Anti-Americanism -- It’s not all Bush’s fault,” Opinion, Aug. 15

Julia E. Sweig forgets that after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the countries of the world were virtually unanimous in their support for the U.S. Instead of recognizing that moment of global good will as a precious and unprecedented opportunity, President Bush went to war, alienated our friends and increased our enemies.

Sweig forgets that domestically, Bush inherited a multibillion-dollar budget surplus and transformed it into a multibillion-dollar deficit. Bush inherited a competent Federal Emergency Management Agency and turned it into the bumbling bureaucracy that made Hurricane Katrina the poster child for government incompetence. Presidents who care about others and not just about power find the wisdom to craft positive change from challenges. The disasters of the Bush administration are the consequences of Bush’s policies and personality: They are not accidents, and they are his fault.

SARAH TAMOR

Santa Monica

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Sweig makes a compelling case about the real reasons the U.S. now engenders so much distrust and hatred in the rest of the world, but she understates the case. The U.S. did not just “attempt” to overthrow governments in Guatemala and Iran; we succeeded. We stopped fledgling democracies in their tracks, partly to serve U.S. business interests that were angry about the policies of the governments we overthrew. Imagine what the Middle East might look like today if we had not been so clever as to install the shah in Iran five decades ago -- five decades of peaceful democratic evolution in the Mideast.

MARSHALL CARTER-TRIPP

El Paso, Texas