Immediately following the sneak attack of September 11th, the influential French newspaper, Le Monde, said: "We are all American". One year later, Le Monde's president, Jean-Marie Colombani, editorialized that " ... the solidarity reflex from one year ago has been drowned in a wave that leads one to believe that, in the world, we have all become anti-American ..."

Canada's Prime Minister Jean Chretien says his message to the United States is "When you are powerful like you are, you guys, it's time to be nice."

Can he be serious?

What does Chretien mean "Be nice"? Invite him to dinner?; lower tariffs?; exactly what does he want us to do? He doesn't say. Nor do other critics. Usually they have a particular point they seek to make. Were they to prevail, they'd soon be back with another and another. Collectively what they want is to run the world on our nickel.

Do the French, the French-Canadians, the English-Canadians and the rest of the world really "hate" America and Americans? If so, why? This wonderment is because we, the people of the United States and the various administrations which we elected to represent us, have been and are the nicest world power and the nicest world citizens that this world has ever met.

Imagine if you can, the world run by the French. Everyone would be required to speak French. Think that's far-fetched? Why do you suppose Haitians, Vietnamese and West Africans speak French? The French are so xenophobic that their Canadian branch would rather divide and destroy a perfectly fine nation like Canada unless all signs are in French as well as English. The Viet Nam civil war originated under destructive French colonial rule. The French were defeated (now that's something the French do exceedingly well) by Ho Chi Minh at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the seeds of our involvement less than a decade later were sown.

Suppose Kruschev had been prophetically right when, at the UN, he thumped his shoe on a desk and said: "We will bury you!" Gulags everywhere, even in Montreal. Were the Arab-American league to protest to a Russian government about discrimination against Arabs, they would simply be killed. That was due process, Russian style. At the height of its military power, Russia could barely feed or house itself. What it did, was what many powerful states have done. They acquire colonies or buffer countries around their perimeter and rape them of goods for the Motherland. The British did that to the Irish. At the height of the famine in Ireland back in the 1830 - 1845 era, Ireland's best meats and produce were exported to England. My ancestors starved in caves and hovels so Englishmen could eat.

Suppose China had American power and its present government. All Quebecois would speak Mandarin, kowtow and like it. Mexicans would never cross the Rio Grande. And the rest of the world would toe the mark or be dead.

The allegedly democratic Greeks allowed democracy to their elite though their slave population was substantial. And so it was throughout the ancient world. The Romans took slaves everywhere they went; they demanded tribute and they got it or the resistors were soon dead. Europe's kings assessed taxes to fund their courts; Hitler took all of Europe. Every country which ever existed and which had the power to do so has conquered neighboring nations or colonialized weaker peoples for the tribute in goods, slaves or resources available for the taking.

Except one.

We paid cash for the Louisiana Purchase and Alaska. After defeating Mexico in 1848, we still paid $15 million dollars to acquire California and the Southwest plus we assumed all obligations otherwise chargeable to Mexico for war damages to U.S. citizen's property. (Texas, a free republic, chose to become a state.) We could have acquired Japan, Germany (twice). We rebuilt our defeated enemies and they are the better off because of us. Today, if we wished, we could take Canada, including its French. We could take its oil, water and wheat. But we don't. We're the only superpower which chooses not to exercise that power in an aggrandizing way. That, alone, makes us nice guys or nicer guys than prior world powers.

The truth is we don't have to be nice. But we are. Certainly we have had our own internal, historical faults. However, we work them out and always trying to improve. As imperfect humans, we will always have faults to work on. But we don't have much to apologize for.