The Observer newspaper in Britain wrote: "America needs to recognize that, all too often, it poses as a champion of democracy while supporting regimes, such as that in Saudi Arabia, which have no proper respect for democracy."
Tariq Ali, a leftist British commentator, wrote that America was now about to wage war on Afghanistan, a country ruled by a religious movement, the Taliban, only as a result of Washington's proxy war against the Soviets.
Bin Laden himself joined in that proxy battle, and became a hero partly because of that war.
"The underlying maxim is, `we will punish the crimes of our enemies and reward the crimes of our friends,'" Ali said.
In an editorial published last week, Le Monde wrote that America is also unreliable in the sense of appearing inconsistent in the nations with which it chooses to ally itself.
The US, it noted, refused to help Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of anti-Taliban forces who died last weekend from injuries suffered in an assassination attempt.
Yet it considers Saudi Arabia an ally, although that "is where the financial support of the Islamic radicals comes from."
In Germany, there was concern that NATO allies had somehow handed Washington a blank check. Die Zeit commented that, "The defender against terror must not act like a furious giant," adding: "The fear of US hegemony is as deep-seated as the anti-American sentiment that bubbled up predictably after Bush came to power."
Anti-Americanism is almost a reflex reaction among some left-of-center French intellectuals, and there has been a predictable outpouring.
To the cry that "we are all Americans now," Marie-Jose Mondzain, director of the prestigious French National Center for Scientific Research, writing in Le Monde, had words of disdain for America and its present administration.
"I don't feel at all American, but to the contrary feel redoubled in me all the reasons to condemn a world that sings along with a catastrophic president, who defends the death penalty and who has only disdain for the Middle East."
`Greatest work of
art imaginable'
Such anti-Americanism is rare in Germany. But the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, 73, called the attack on the World Trade Center "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos," impressive for the imagination of the act and the precision of its execution.
His commentary was regarded with horror by a nation that has reached out to Americans with sympathy and support, and Stockhausen apologized, saying that his allegorical remarks had been misunderstood.
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