International Affairs

Amnesty International’s 2004 report attracted an unusual amount of attention this week because of the stress that its Secretary General, Irene Kahn, laid on the United States’ failings. Her comparison of the Guantanamo detention facility to the Soviet-era gulag system was denounced by the US president, vice president, and defense secretary. There is little reason to discuss this comparison any further, except to note that it makes a change when the left compares Bush to Stalin instead of to Hitler.

However, the Secretary General’s remarks were just the preamble to a lengthy report on the state of human rights throughout the world. Surely an organization concerned with the relief of suffering and injustice would be most concerned with the worst cases, and in fact, the dismal situation in is Darfur the first case discussed and is dealt with at some length. It is a fair inference that the Secretary General wishes to call the world’s attention to the abuses AI regards as most egregious and urgent. While ceding pride of place to Sudan, the United States also receives lengthy attention. Without descending into utilitarianism, it must also be a fair inference that abuses not mentioned in the Secretary General’s statement are regarded as less offensive, capricious, or cruel than the ones mentioned, and less deserving of the world’s attention.

Here are ten other countries whose endeavors in the fields of human rights and jurisprudence were not thought worth mentioning in the Secretary General’s summary. Because of the special scrutiny of the United States by Amnesty, where there is some mention of the US in the context of the report on another country, AI’s remarks are noted.

Countries not mentioned in Irene Kahn’s message:

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Fouad Ajami, one of my favorite Middle East writers, reports on the impressions he got from his recent trips to the Middle east:

To venture into the Arab world, as I did recently over four weeks in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, is to travel into Bush Country. I was to encounter people from practically all Arab lands, to listen in on a great debate about the possibility of freedom and liberty. I met Lebanese giddy with the Cedar Revolution that liberated their country from the Syrian prison that had seemed an unalterable curse. They were under no illusions about the change that had come their way. They knew that this new history was the gift of an American president who had put the Syrian rulers on notice. The speed with which Syria quit Lebanon was astonishing, a race to the border to forestall an American strike that the regime could not discount. I met Syrians in the know who admitted that the fear of American power, and the example of American forces flushing Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole, now drive Syrian policy. They hang on George Bush’s words in Damascus, I was told: the rulers wondering if Iraq was a crystal ball in which they could glimpse their future.

The weight of American power, historically on the side of the dominant order, now drives this new quest among the Arabs. For decades, the intellectual classes in the Arab world bemoaned the indifference of American power to the cause of their liberty. Now a conservative American president had come bearing the gift of Wilsonian redemption. For a quarter century the Pax Americana had sustained the autocracy of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak: He had posed as America’s man on the Nile, a bulwark against the Islamists. He was sly and cunning, running afoul of our purposes in Iraq and over Israeli-Palestinian matters. He had nurtured a culture of antimodernism and anti-Americanism, and had gotten away with it. Now the wind from Washington brought tidings: America had wearied of Mr. Mubarak, and was willing to bet on an open political process, with all its attendant risks and possibilities. The brave oppositional movement in Cairo that stepped forth under the banner of Kifaya (“Enough!”) wanted the end of his reign: It had had enough of his mediocrity, enough of the despotism of an aging officer who had risen out of the military bureaucracy to entertain dynastic dreams of succession for his son. Egyptians challenging the quiescence of an old land may have had no kind words to say about America in the past. But they were sure that the play between them and the regime was unfolding under Mr. Bush’s eyes.

Indeed, this is a spectacular meeting in time. The fact is that people everywhere want some same basic things, summed up by the Virginian Renaissance Man, Thomas Jefferson, thus: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As the world has modernized, the list of demands has grown, but the same basic rights underlie all. Thus, given an opportunity, the people will act.

Unfortunately, American power hasn’t always been on the right side. For this, America is understanbly excoriated and suspected. But it is curious (though not to true liberals) that anti-Americanism is strongest in relatively peaceful societies that are yet repressed by nominal allies of the United Sates (e.g., Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia), and yet not quite as strong among the people abandoned by America when they sought to answer her bright call (the Shiites of Iraq).

This time, though, America might just be on the right side, and, at the very least, her intentions seem true and sincere. A glaring exception thus far, however, is in Uzbekistan. But that will not stop Lebanese activists from pursuing their own opportunity to try the democratic experiment, especially as America keeps an eye on, and continues to pressure, Syria.

Mr. Ajami even draws the obvious correlation with Europe at the end of the Cold War:

As I made my way on this Arab journey, I picked up a meditation that Massimo d’Azeglio, a Piedmontese aristocrat who embraced that “springtime” in Europe, offered about his time, which speaks so directly to this Arab time: “The gift of liberty is like that of a horse, handsome, strong, and high-spirited. In some it arouses a wish to ride; in many others, on the contrary, it increases the desire to walk.” It would be fair to say that there are many Arabs today keen to walk–frightened as they are by the prospect of the Islamists coming to power and curtailing personal liberties, snuffing out freedoms gained at such great effort and pain. But more Arabs, I hazard to guess, now have the wish to ride. It is a powerful temptation that George W. Bush has brought to their doorstep.

Read the whole thing, and thank goodness for writers like Mr. Ajami!

[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]

I have meant for some time to post the following passage from Gerard Alexander’s review of two books about “neoconservatives” in the Winter 2004 Claremont Review of Books.

More important, treating neocons as an ideological community invites critics to treat their ideas as the product of an ideological heritage instead of as the product of hard-won, real-world experience. If they saw them as the latter, critics would set out instead to evaluate the validity of neocon ideas compared to other foreign policy proposals on offer. This should come naturally to Halper and Clarke. After all, they say neocons should be analyzed as a “political interest group,” and political science research on that subject usually highlights competition between interest groups. But Halper and Clarke focus only on neocons in isolation. This leaves them saying, with many others, that neocons took over after 9/11 because they “were ready with a detailed, plausible blueprint.” This suggests there wasn’t competition between points of view, and that neocons took over foreign policy without a fight because they were zealous and well-positioned.

This asks us to ignore the traditional realists and liberal institutionalists who were also full of advice and on the scene. As Norman Podhoretz says, it also asks us to believe “that strong-minded people like Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice could be fooled by a bunch of cunning subordinates.” Consequently, it precludes consideration of the crucial possibility that maybe those people adopted key neocon proposals because rival approaches did not provide credible alternatives. After the Cold War, and especially after 9/11, U.S. leaders faced two overarching national security questions: What should U.S. grand strategy be in a “unipolar” world? And how should America deal with violent Islamism and its global ambitions? “Neoconservatism” can be understood as an alternative, on these two matters, to traditional realism and liberal institutionalism. And a careful reading of the facts, as opposed to a reading of some texts, suggests that the common stereotype is a caricature of the neocons, not a useful guide to them.

(Emphasis added.)

Click this link and scroll down to read an exchange between Natan Sharansky and Patrick Buchanan. It’s worth the effort, as these two men perfectly represent the isolationist/anti-war vs. interventionist/neo-Wilsonian/democracy-spreading debate that is at the center of current controversy about U.S. involvement in the Middle East.

It’s notable that Sharansky, whose spoken English isn’t very good, more than holds his own against the famously articulate Buchanan. I think this fact reflects partly on Sharansky’s great intelligence and focus, but more on the strength of his argument against appeasing dictators and for supporting democratic govt in places that have never known it.

The crazy thing is that nobody in the Bush administration makes the case as effectively as does this foreign pol with his heavily accented English. Is this because Bush doesn’t recognize the importance of making his case directly to the public? Or are the Administration’s best spokespeople too encumbered with other duties to be involved in this important task? Either way it reflects poorly on the Administration’s priorities. Reagan, like W, faced a hostile press yet did an admirable job of explaining himself to the public. Bush seems to rely on a few allies in the mainstream press and on bloggers. It’s not enough.

(via Ann Althouse)