To hear American's claim that any attack on America is an attack on freedom itself is to claim that America is synonymous with freedom, which is enough to make any non-America cringe and wonder if the speaker has ever even left his country. The targets attacked were not icons of democracy, they were pillars of American commerce, American military power, American government (failed attack) and American foreign policy.

The attacks are wrong, misguided and desperate, but they are not an attack on freedom. Potentially coming from a country that has been fought over, bombed and attacked by American power for over 30 years, the attacks are more of a desperate attempt to strike back at America in particular, in any way they can rather than any poor attempt at attacking freedom itself.

The language employed stinks of a kind of patriotism akin to complete indifference to the rest of the world and ignorance of America's own problems. There is a very showy, macho, self-gratifying kind of righteousness in American speech about themselves which people either assume is intentionally ironic and over the top, or they are shocked and end up thinking that American's actually think like that. Even I would be shocked if I thought they mean to communicate things in the way they do, sometimes, I like to put it down to differences in our usage of English, rather than think that President Bush really feels that America has been "called to defend freedom". The amount of self loving literature in American culture is assumed by many to be an indication that America's population deep down feel bad about their country.