Associated Press -- The United States should capitalize on President George W. Bush's coming visit to Vietnam to increase pressure on the communist nation to improve its human rights record, rights activists said.
With Vietnam now headed by a reformist president and negotiating for membership in the World Trade Organization, the time was ripe to prod the southeast Asian nation to build on the positive steps it has taken, such as loosening media restrictions and granting more independence to the national assembly, the activists said, addressing a panel of federal lawmakers Thursday.
Meanwhile...From: http://billmon.org/
"The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."
Powell, of course, is the master of bureaucratic understatement (although not nearly understated enough for Commander Codpiece's tastes). By "the world is beginning to doubt," Powell really meant "the world has long since stopped believing." But if Congress ... formally gives Dear Leader -- and future dear leaders -- a free pass on the Geneva Conventions, if it lets the torturers define torture, then the moral basis of the war against terrorism isn't the only thing that will be put to the test. In fact it will be the least thing.
What will be on the table then is the question of whether a nation as powerful and potentially dangerous to others as America (the proverbial bull in the china shop) can survive on brute force alone -- without moral legitimacy or political prestige, without true allies (save for the world's other leper regimes) and without "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind".
We're not there yet, but that is the direction we're heading, and a unilateral decision to redefine the Geneva Conventions (without actually admitting that we're doing it) would take us another few hundred miles down the road.
What this amounts to (and what Powell was really complaining about) is the final decommissioning of the myth of American exceptionalism -- once one of the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal. Without it, we're just another paranoid empire obsessed with our own security and willing to tell any lie or repudiate any self-proclaimed principle if we think it will make us even slightly safer.
To put it mildly, this is not the kind of flag the rest of the world is likely to rally around, no matter how frantically we wave it. Even Shrub seems to understand this somewhere in the dimly lit attic that is his mind -- thus his recent remark that an America that doesn't advance the cause of freedom is an America that has lost its soul. It's easy to paint this as delusional, or an updated version of the old Orwellian slogan that slavery = freedom, but Shrub at least seems to understands that America will have to convince the world it stands for more than just power, privilege and profit if it's going to attract the support of the 80% of the human race that lacks all three. How, exactly, would ditching the Geneva Conventions further this goal?
Then again, maybe it's best if the myth gets permanently busted. Maybe America should take public responsibility for torturing prisoners -- instead of just pawning the job off to the Jordanian or Egyptian or Saudi intelligence services, who could and would hook car batteries to testicles with gusto while we piously pronounced our hands (and hearts) clean. A U.S. torture statute would at least bring a certain degree of clarity to the "vague" and "open to interpretation" policies that have long allowed the United States to enjoy the fruits of torture (and other crimes) without actually committing them ourselves. I know that's not exactly the kind of clarity Shrub was asking for today, but it would still be a refreshing oubreak of honesty.
That said, though, nobody should have any illusions about what that kind of "clarity" would reveal and which side of the moral line the United States would be seen to be standing on.
No comments:
Post a Comment