Foreign Policy Starts Well Before The Water's Edge
Today in the Washington Post, two stories caught my eye. The first, the story of a filmmaker severely tortured in North Korea, who escaped through immense determination and hardship, then sold a kidney to raise the money to tell his story.
The second, about an Algerian detainee , who America had imprisoned for five years with no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing. He was guilty of being Algerian, an avionics technician, and overstaying a six month visa. Bad circumstantials--which caused Canada to turn him over to the US for questioning. Questioning made sense. Imprisonment for five years--that is not America.
When John F. Kennedy opened his first "domestic" debate (while the leader of the USSR was in New York at the United Nations) he spoke the following words:
There is evil in the world--the North Korean torture chambers and gulags make that abundantly clear. And because there are people who would cause harm if they could, we must maintain a strong military to give our diplomacy bite. But the fight against terror abroad, and the maintenance of civil liberties at home, need to be inextricably intertwined. The dripping destruction of our civil liberties does not help us fight our enemies. Information obtained under torture tends to be untrustworthy, and imprisonment of innocent Arabs turns a public we need on our side against us. But it does undermine our strength and unity as a country. The first step in a real fight against fundamentalists who seek to deprive others of their lives and liberties, must be to uphold our own.
Here we go again: Eeeeevuuuuhllllll!
Gee, if we're such a force for good then why does the world consider us to be a bigger danger than say, Iran?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1653561/posts
Of course, this totally overlooks WHY there are people who would cause us harm ... and most usually, its precisely because of the "bite" of our "diplomacy" backed by our military (example: 1953 CIA coup that re-installed the Shah into power after he had been peacefully overthrown by a secular, Western, democratic movement in Iran)
For example, how about our role in places like Central America -- who were the "terrorists" there? Who armed and trained and financed the death squads who carried out the massacre at El Mazote? Iranians? Nope. Hezbollah? Guess again.
We spend more on our military than ALL OF THE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED. And we arms and support and back various human rights abusers and tyrants. Our "diplomacy" and our "military" cannot be simply assumed to be a force for good as this author claims.
July 21, 2006 9:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Funny how all discussion of foreign policy in this country always ends up with gushing self-love.
Our civil liberties matter. To quote Ms Kleinfeld, the first step in fighting the bad guys must be to uphold OUR liberties.
Lovely.
50,000 Iraqis would be alive today if we hadn't invaded their country. What about "their" liberties? How about making it the "first step" in a real fight against bad guys that 50,000 innocent people shouldn't lose their lives because of us.
How about that for a change?
Yes, there is evil in the world. Next time you write, Ms Kleinfeld, please answer this question: why wouldn't anyone, besides self-loving Americans, consider our killing of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis something... what's the word again, oh yes... EVIL ??
July 21, 2006 9:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Can someone explain why Larry Johnson’s most recent article just disappeared from TPM and is posted on HuffPo?
July 21, 2006 9:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know, but it looks like the post is back, minus the comments.
July 21, 2006 11:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Last night I couldn't post at all.
I assumed Josh had lowered the boom. but apparently not as the account is functioning this morning or I wouldn't be posting this.
This morning I had to revalidate the account.
Some of my posts in various threads appear to have disappeared - or at least they were last night, I should recheck this morning.
Larry's article ended up linked at HuffPo, but nobody could access it from that end either.
Weird.
July 22, 2006 7:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
If ever there was a word that should be banned from any discourse about politics and the world in general it is "evil". That word needs to join the word "nigger" as forbidden in any civilized discussion. Those who get their kicks from such words need to make weekly visits to their churches where the word is a welcome one.
The rest of the world seems to increasingly view us as backwoodsmen, devoid of social graces and knowledge. Our President, of course, is responsible for most of that, but our persistence in using a nonsense word, while thinking we are saying something profound adds to it. Ms Kleinfeld destroyed any value her post had by tossing in that word.
Hoppy in Sacramento
July 22, 2006 8:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Just for the record - Imprisoning someone without charges, without trial, for five years on 'suspicion', that's America. Invading countries which pose no threat... that's America... Torture? America... Death squads? America...
Wake up and take a good hard look at what you've become. Only then can you start to change it.
July 22, 2006 8:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
And it's a shame your original post on this thread was deleted. I'm thinking it was perhaps, your best -- certainly, your wittiest.
For those who missed it, Transhuman's comment -- the first entry in the thread -- was "Okay".
July 22, 2006 10:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hang on a minute here - I don't have time right now to read about the filmmaker being "tortured" but when I first read about the filmmaker in North Korea, he was living quite comfortably and escaped when the North Koreans let him got Austria or somewhere around there to scout a film location.
I'm not condoning kidnapping but let's at least get the story straight.
July 22, 2006 12:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, I saw that. It was very funny indeed. TH has been on a bit of a roll for the last couple of weeks.
July 22, 2006 3:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Transhuman,
I thought you were gone too. Clicking on your screen name still gets the message that I am unauthorized to see your page. What do you get if you click on your own name? Are you authorized to see your own previous comments?
For a while I assumed that I was banished to the ether too.
We seem to be back to the same place. There were some particular posts that were the last straw and caused the entire post and thread of comments to be pulled down and some members to be offed as the only way to stop the abuse. I wish I could see the original thread and could then at least guess which comments were over the highly subjective line.
July 22, 2006 4:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mrs. Panstreppon says:
The Washington Post says:
Sounds like Torture to me. I expect it took me less time to click the link to the Washington Post Story than it took the original commentator to write the comment.
Mike
July 22, 2006 4:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Happy to oblige, Hoppy. But I need an alternative word to encapsulate the behavior this post describes. Give me one which conveys the emotion of the word without the religious connotation of the word. If I don't call all of this "evil" what do I call it?
Mike
July 22, 2006 5:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
And Chalabi was going to lead us to the Land of the Sugar-Plum WMDs. I read it in the Washington Post.
July 22, 2006 5:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
The link isn't working.
Mike
July 22, 2006 6:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Many nations, including the US, do things that are morally and legally wrong. It is sufficient to point that out and work to find ways to stop those acts. That is a positive activity, while name calling is just name calling, and is more suitable for preteens than for adults. North Korea, for example, is exceedingly aggressive in its posture towards other nations, is morally remiss in allowing its citizens to starve, and should be directing its revenue towards feeding and educating its citizens instead of towards useless weapons of war. We need to engage the leadership of North Korea to seek ways to change those behaviors.
Hoppy in Sacramento
July 22, 2006 6:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Perhaps, I should have said his most economical rather than his wittiest. Wouldn't want these encomiums to go to his head; it's large enough as it is. :-)
July 22, 2006 6:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
I didn't mean my remark as snark, Hoppy. I can see how it could be taken that way, and I apologize for not being clearer.
I read the post a little differently, with "evil" attached to the actions, not the regimes. I think there's some ambiguity in what Kleinfeld wrote. 25% of the piece is a Kennedy quote: the rest doesn't explicate it very well or connect the abuses in the two articles she references to each other and to her general principle (which I take to be something remarkably like People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones) as she might have done had she expanded her insights further.
I agree that name-calling isn't very useful, even when it's tempting. But on the other hand, mho, the action of torture or the action of holding someone without charges for 5 years seems so horrific to me that condemning it as morally remiss doesn't carry a strong enough emotional charge.
Speeding and shoplifting are legally and morally wrong, but they don't push my buttons the way the behaviors in these articles do. I give my students a reading from Cicero in which he asserts that our capacity for reason gives us the ability to discern right from wrong, good from evil. Paraphrasing him, one doesn't need a law to know that rape is a wicked act. I'd say the same obtains for torture, holding an Algerian in jail for 58 months even though he was cleared of any terrorist associations, or any other extreme abuse of one's power over another. And I say that not withstanding the logic chopping of Alberto Gonzales or Professor John Yoo. I need a powerful word (maybe reprehensible works?) for actions as wicked as the articles linked described. Mike
July 22, 2006 9:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
The problem with the use of the word evil is two-fold.
First, it creates a moralistic black-white distinction which is unrealistic and inaccurate. They're unmitigated "evil" therefore we are unmitigated "Good". Problem is, we're not.
But the most important problem with the use of the word evil is that it is a short-cut to thinking; a label that communicates an attitude but not knowledge. To say that they're "evil" is to say that its their "nature" to be this way, thus disregarding the historical/factual context of events. It makes the other side sound like irrational non-humans, monsters. Its a lot easier to hate "them" if we simply consider them to be "evil" and develop an historical amnesia as to facts and events that 1- may be embarrassing and uncomfortable to acknowledge for our side, and 2- its a lot easier to dehumanize your enemy if you claim that they have inherent (genetic?) negative attributes that makes them less worthy.
The same points apply with the use of the word "hate". Remember after 9/11 we were told that we should not inquire as to "why" there was such an event -- that sort of thinking was said to be akin to supporting terrorism -- rather we were told (by FoxNews) that we should simply accept that "they" simply hate us. And That's all we should know.
"They" hate us. "They're" evil... "They" should be attacked and massacred...
Its an old story.
July 22, 2006 10:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Cancel my comment. I read the article and realized I had the wrong filmmaker. The one I was thinking about was kidnapped by the North Koreans in South Korea.
July 23, 2006 4:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
A couple of weeks ago, I couldn't access my TPM Cafe account and I assumed I had been kicked out of the club.
I wrote to Josh Marshall about the possibility of leaving a forwarding address and he asked me what I was talking about.
He told me that a software glitch caused the problem and I was never banned from the TPM CAfe.
Boy, was I happy! I didn't feel like re-creating thirty or forty posts somewhere else.
BTW, I found some maps of the North of the Russian Federation that I had forgotten about. I created a MSN space and posted them there but the maps are blurry and hard to read.
IIRC, the maps were created by a Norwegian group trying to help people indigenous to northern Russia. I think what the Norwegians did was take old maps from the '60s and mark them up to identify current oil exploraton and drilling.
Where the Norwegians got the maps in the first place is an interesting question.
If these maps are accurate, the frigging Russians have been blowing up atom bombs inside the Arctic Circle. Nice, really nice. Must be really good for the environment.
Here's the link to the MSN space I created named "Russian Maps from the '60s with nuclear test sites and oil fields marked". If anyone is interested, I can email originals once I figure how to email pictures.
July 23, 2006 4:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ummm.. no, it's not "America". It is however, an example of what human beings can be capable of.. whether we're talking about American human beings, or Arab human beings, or Asian human beings, or English, or French or German or Scandinavian or Swiss or Australian or Indian or Pakistani or Egyptian or African or Cuban or what have you, human beings.
Those sort of abuses have gone on since time immemorial, it's nothing new and honestly, if you aren't fighting the behavior, you really aren't against those abuses.. perhaps you're just looking to trash America? Fact is, in America we have the ability to significantly weaken Bush this November, and we have the ability to toss him out of office in a few years. Our nation is not George W. Bush.
Bush isn't the first despot in the world, nor is he the only one at present.. perhaps you need to wake up and take a good long hard look at yourself and snap out of it.
July 23, 2006 8:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Beg to differ.
Tell the Nicaraguans, the El Salvadorans, the Hondurans, the Argentineans and Chileans that its not America.
Tell it to the Sioux on their trail of tears. Or the blackfoot, herded to North Dakota and then finding that land being stolen from them.
Tell it to the Aguinaldo and the Phillipines of the Insurgency. Or tell it to the deformed children of Vietnam growing up with Agent Orange.
Tell it to blacks who were freed by the civil war only to be bound in a southern revival of sharecropper slavery and Jim Crow laws.
Tell it to those same blacks today, including the ones in Florida victimized by felon voting laws, those stopped for 'driving while black', who are subject to radically unequal treatment before the law.
Tell it to the men being gangraped in the American prison system.
Look, I don't want to get into an argument with you. There's a lot that is right with America, the generosity, the idealism, the openheartedness and compassion of Americans cannot be denied.
But your other country has this other face, this 'Hyde' face, that is the counterpart to your angelic 'Jekyl.'
I can acknowledge every good thing about America. But at the same time, I have to say that your dark face is absolutely psychotic, its racist, violent, bent on utter hatred, it knows no boundaries and it holds a grudge forever.
You may not like that America, but its a real America. And the only way you are ever going to get anywhere is by acknowledgling the eality of that America and fighting.
If you sit around doing nothing but telling each other how good you are... Well, there goes Iraq.
July 23, 2006 8:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
But in originally evil meant uppity. In old and middle English it devolved to bad. Extreme moral wikedness is a modern sense. The postmodern sense is jump 17 flaming busses on a motocycle.
Neoboho
July 23, 2006 2:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ummm...how shall I put this...Bush won't be running in a few years. His second term will be up. He can't be re-elected again. Says so right in the constitution. So, I should really hope that you have the ability to "toss him out in a few years"
Problem is, you tossed him into office for a second term. And now, we live in a country where people are spied upon, where telephone conversations are monitored, where people can be tortured, imprisoned for 5 years even when they're known to be innocent, sent to other countries to be tortured, kept in Gitmo, and where our govt violates international law by attacking other nations, and arms war criminals to attack other nations' civilians etc etc.
And yes, that is America. And who is in office make only the tinyest bit of difference since it was Clinton who illegally bombed a "chemical weapons plant" (aka vet pharmaceutical plant) in Sudan, and whose secretary of state said that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children as a result of sanctions was "worth it".
So, you see, the problem is not limited to Bush or the White House.
And here's a prediction: next election, you;ll vote for another moron -- mainly because despite all the talk of "democracy", you won't much of a choice. You see, the democratc system in America is fundamentally corrupted amd dominated by the Dems and Repugs, aka Coke and Pepsi. And all the rest of it is just showmanship to make the vast unwashed hordes THINK their vote counts.
July 24, 2006 4:29 AM | Reply | Permalink