Answering anti-Americanism

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KINGSTON, Jamaica -- Thomas C. "Cliff" Tighe became the top career diplomat at the U.S. Embassy here just as a wave of anti-American sentiment swept through the Caribbean island over the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Jamaica, or rather its university-educated elite, long has had a love-hate relationship with the United States, rooted in the 1970s socialist and ardently pro-Cuba policies of the late Prime Minister Michael Manley.

It's the angry side of that bipolar relationship that Mr. Tighe, deputy chief of mission, encountered after becoming deputy chief of mission last July, serving directly under Ambassador Sue Cobb.

Mr. Tighe, a former U.S. Marine, maintained the embassy's diplomatic decorum as antiwar sentiment simmered over the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Jamaica's political leaders blasted the U.S. "unilateralism," and some influential newspaper columnists occasionally compared the U.S. actions to those of Hitler's Third Reich.

Facing an uphill battle to explain U.S. foreign policy, embassy officials gave even-tempered radio interviews and slipped opinion articles by Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, into Kingston's two daily papers. At one point, they even sent a Kingston newspaper editor on a U.S.-funded trip to Washington and New York, hoping to give him a better understanding of American foreign policy and perhaps soften his antiwar position. They didn't succeed.

Speaking out

Last month, however, Mr. Tighe cast aside the embassy's usual decorum to publicly criticize remarks by a popular Jamaican politician -- Bruce Golding, chairman of the center-right opposition Jamaica Labor Party.

Speaking at a church gathering, Mr. Golding had suggested that U.S. foreign policy was unjust and had provoked the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but that Jamaicans need not worry about terrorism here.