Krugman on Human Rights

I have never linked to Paul Krugman, not that I don't like what he has to say, but so many already do so, I would feel like carrying coals to Newcastle. Today, however, he has an absolutely on-target comment that speaks to precisely why I don't accept the Bush administration's posturing on human rights issues and think that his human rights policy is inconsistent and a miserable failure. Here's the money quote:

Yet that moral punctiliousness is curiously selective. Last year the Bush administration, in return for a military base in Uzbekistan, gave $500 million to a government that, according to the State Department, uses torture "as a routine investigation technique," and whose president has killed opponents with boiling water. The moral clarity police were notably quiet.

Indeed. Heh.

Comments

[akaky]

Besides, there is no
king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to
the arbitrement of swords, can try it out with all
unspotted soldiers: some peradventure have on them
the guilt of premeditated and contrived murder;
some, of beguiling virgins with the broken seals of
perjury; some, making the wars their bulwark, that
have before gored the gentle bosom of peace with
pillage and robbery.--Henry V, Act 4, scene 1.

He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.--Franklin Roosevelt

is krugman right? yes he is. can the united states afford to be so scrupulous about our allies when we are trying to fight a war in central asia? no we cant. the people running those countries are who they are; we can lecture them on human rights till we are blue in the face but unless we are prepared to overthrow those governments then we are stuck with them. does that stink? yes it does, but the alternative is that they do not give us bases and we cannot fight in afghanistan, which in essence means letting al-qaeda have a secure base from which to plan further attacks against us. is that a royal pain in our democratic backside? yes it is, but there are times in life when you just bite down on your tongue and say nothing and this is one of those times. i wish it were otherwise, but it isnt. martin luther once pointed out that after the second coming the lion will lie with the lamb, but until then if the lamb lies down with the lion the lamb will have to be replaced frequently.

[Randy Paul]

Akaky,

What I find so annoying about that position is that it was exactly the position of the Reagan administration regarding Iraq. It also means that in essence, our leaders are really just hypocrites on that issue. I don't think that those are our two choices here.

I sincerely hope that in 20 years we're not fighting in Uzbekistan and whoever's president then saying that Islam Kerimov is "evil" and does horrible things to his people.

[Michael J. Totten]

Randy,

What do you think about Roosevelt aligning the US with Stalin to defeat Hitler? Do you damn him for that? I don't.

Tactical alliances are sometimes necessary. I don't yet know if Bush's position on Uzbekistan is necessary or idiotic. Do you? Do you really?

Bush is condemned when he criticizes dictators, and condemned when he doesn't. I'm glad I'm not him.

[Michael J. Totten]

Randy: I sincerely hope that in 20 years we're not fighting in Uzbekistan and whoever's president then saying that Islam Kerimov is "evil" and does horrible things to his people.

But Kerimov is evil and does do horrible things to his people. You are slamming Bush for not saying so now. And you suggest that you will slam him in the future if he later tells the truth. That is an impossible standard.

[akaky]

"It also means that in essence, our leaders are really just hypocrites on that issue. I don't think that those are our two choices here."

randy, yes, by any standard they are hypocrites. unfortunately politics is the art of the possible, not the art of the perfect, and sometimes you dont get to pick your allies. during the revolution our ally was ancien regime france; during the civil war the united states was backed by russia and abraham lincoln said nothing in public about the suppression of the polish revolt of 1863 because he wanted to keep the russians on our side. world war i we supported tsarist russia; in ww2 we backed the soviet union, and yes, in the iraq-iran war we supported iraq even though iraq was the aggressor. history does not reveal its alternatives nor can politicians see what the result of their policies will be a generation hence. will the support we are giving the stans now backfire on us in twenty years time? possibly, but we are fighting a war now and we need the stans now, however much we may loathe what their governments do to their own people. however much we may want things to be otherwise, we must use the tools at hand and then move forward.

[Michael J. Totten]

I agree with Akaky above.

But we do need to be very very careful when we align ourselves with foreign thugs like Stalin and Kerimov. We need to make sure when we "use" them that we do so against real enemies like Hitler and Al Qaeda, not phantom enemies like Salvador Allende and Nelson Mandela.

[Randy Paul]

Michael,

I don't think your analogy with FDR and Stalin is really germane here. Both the US and USSR were attacked or had war declared on them by Hitler, whereas Uzbekistan was gifted with half a billion dollars simply because of an accident of geography. Also, Roosevelt didn't have the words moral clarity shooting out of his mouth at every photo op.

Cite your history, all you want, but the question comes to this: do we ever learn from our experiences? Are we going to add Islam Kerimov's name to the long list that includes Saddam Hussein, Ferdinand Marcos, Augusto Pinochet, Reza Pahlavi, Anastásio Somoza, Manuel Noriega, Carlos Castillo Armas, The Greek Colonels, Sukarno, Suharto, Mobutu Sese Seko, Jonas Savimbi? George Santayana must be doing somersaults, cartwheels and backflips in his grave, undoubtedly no longer being content to spin.

Michael, it's not simply a matter of being damned when he doesn't condemn a dictator; he's made an alliance with a murderous dictator and gave him $500,000,000 while he turned away the democratically elected president of Bolivia, Gonzálo Sánchez de Lozada empty-handed, eventually throwing a paltry $10,000,000 his way. What kind of message does that send to the rest of the world? Do you not see any risk in this creating a new generation of America haters?

[Michael J. Totten]

Randy,

What if the Taliban were still in power (and Al Qaeda still going strong) because Uzbekistan and Pakistan wouldn't help us out? Would you feel better or worse about the situation in general? If Bush followed that route he could have had pure rhetorical moral clarity but also be unable to make any difference on the ground where it counts. I'll take action over words any day.

Do you not see any risk in this creating a new generation of America haters?

Yes I do. Which is why we can't prop up a new Pinochet against a new Allende. We also can't go around doing what Clinton did with the Palestinians and impose a brutal fascist like Arafat on them because he can "fight terrorism" without the scrutiny of human rights organizations.

Using Kerimov to whack Mullah Omar is a completely different story from ejecting Allende in favor of a military regime. I don't think the two can be compared at all. Salvador Allende was no Mullah Omar, and Kerimov was already in place when we got there.

Either way, we should dump the bastard the first chance we get.

[Michael J. Totten]

Thanks for the discussion, by the way. This is a difficult problem. I am actually more conflicted on this than it may appear in my posts.

[akaky]

randy, it's not a question of learning from your experiences. there is never an exact analogy between one historical experience and another; the personalities involved are different, the histories and cultures are different, the circumstances are different, so when we use our experiences we must be careful that we are not mistaking one thing for another. abba eban once pointed out that analogies can be very dangerous, since the circumstances being compared can be very different. that a bolivian democrat rates $10 million and a central asian dictator rates half a billion stinks, but we are fighting a war in central asia and we are not fighting one in central south america, unless the drug war heats up sometime soon and bush has to do "something" about bolivia.

[akaky]

i'm repeating myself up there

[Randy Paul]

Michael, you often posit hypotheticals as if the choice is either a or b. That's very rarely the case and it certainly isn't the case with Kerimov. There was no carrot and stick approach, only carrot. Bush could have granted some of the aid and made it conditional on genuine improvements in the HR situation and movements toward greater democracy. There could have been acknowledgment of the situation regarding HR in Uzbekistan and a public commitment that aid would be conditional on improvements. Instead, there was no acknowledgment, nothing. I suppose the people of Uzbekistan are wondering why the US thinks that the Iraqis are deserving of regime change from a monstrous dictator and they are not.

You are slamming Bush for not saying so now. And you suggest that you will slam him in the future if he later tells the truth. That is an impossible standard.

That's not even remotely what I meant. I'm slamming Bush now for supporting a dictator and I regret the possibility that in 20 years American lives will be expended to get rid of this dictator which is what happened in the 1980's and what is happening now in Iraq.

[Randy Paul]

Akaky,

there is never an exact analogy between one historical experience and another; the personalities involved are different, the histories and cultures are different, the circumstances are different, so when we use our experiences we must be careful that we are not mistaking one thing for another.

Well, you were the one who brought up Lincoln and the support from Russia while ignoring the Polish revolt of 1863.

As for Bush's snub of Lozada and Bolivia, what the hell is wrong with being proactive?

[akaky]

well, here i am, once again hoist painfully by my own petard. i was trying to answer your question about learning from our experiences. what i was trying to say was that in learning from history, learning from our experiences, that we cant get so locked into a is like b so we must respond by doing c because that's what we did the last time a and b happened.