Dragonlich

I'd say a lot of the people "hating" the US in most of Europe can be divided into:

- a very small percentage of people who really hate the US. Usually extreme left/right people, and/or extremist muslims.
- a large percentage of people who hate what the US stands for in their eyes, be it raw power (scary), stupid politicians, over-the-edge capitalism (evil), bad environmental plans, religious nuts ruling the country, etc.
- another large percentage would be young people that say they hate the US because everyone does.

People generally don't hate the US as a whole - hell, they don't even *know* the US or it's people. All they see is their little problems, their little grievance. In that sense, the invasion of Iraq "confirmed" many of these anti-US feelings. No matter if they're right or not, what they see is this: you don't care about other countries, you torture and kill innocent civilians, you only invaded because of oil (=bad for environment, abuse of power, corruption, etc), you only made things worse for the poor Iraqis...

As I said, no matter if what they see is real or not, they'll hate you for it. The media increases those feelings by only showing the bad things, and people generally don't take the time to find out if things are as they seem. Example: in the Netherlands, all we hear out of Iraq is that people are blown up every day. We occasionally hear vague stories about how our soldiers there are doing a lot of good work. What we DON'T see is the rebuilding of the country, the many Iraqis that don't get blown up... We don't see the context of the news, only the little (bad) incidents.

A perfect example seems to be that statement from Jesus Pimp... The US as a whole is held responsible for the actions of a few people. There are greedy people (thus "countries") all over the world, but we don't hear about them.