No One Will Play With Americans

I wish I could sit down and have a chat with Thomas Friedman today.  He seems upset and confused about the unpopularity of America in the world.  He warns us (the world) that we’d be in considerably worse shape if American power wasn’t available:

Perfect we are not, but America still has some moral backbone. There are travesties we will not tolerate. The U.N. vote on Zimbabwe demonstrates that this is not true for these “popular” countries — called Russia or China or South Africa — that have no problem siding with a man who is pulverizing his own people.

So, yes, we’re not so popular in Europe and Asia anymore. I guess they would prefer a world in which America was weaker, where leaders with the values of Vladimir Putin and Thabo Mbeki had a greater say, and where the desperate voices for change in Zimbabwe would, well, just shut up.

Uh, Mr. Friedman, “moral backbone” you say?!

Friedman’s comments remind me of that old canard about dissent: if you don’t like it here, go somewhere else.  Friedman is saying, if you think we’re bad, check out the others.  At this moment in time, I don’t care too much about “the others”, the bad actors who behave so badly they make America look good.  Perhaps the biggest problem this planet has at the moment is that America has squandered whatever moral authority it might have had.  It has squandered it in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It threatens to squander it in Pakistan and Iran.  It has squandered it at home, amongst its own citizens.

Nor can I think of any country other than the US that can claim both the power and the requisite ethical standing.  Britain lost it shortly after 9/11.  It took a only a bit longer for Canada to collapse at the feet of its powerful neighbour.

Sure Robert Mugabe is “worse than” George Bush.  But how can Friedman believe that an American President ought to command a following in the world simply because he isn’t as bad as one of its worst dictators?

Mugabe appears to have wrested power from his people in brutal fashion.  Dissent is repressed.  No doubt people are being detained, tortured and killed.  In sharp relief to the citizens of that country, the American people have willingly granted their President authoritarian power.  He can now detain and torture innocent people along with those merely not yet proven guilty.  He can detain them seemingly endlessly and without meaningful judicial review, and I say this despite the decision of the Supreme Court in Boumediene – because it seems to me unlikely that detainees will be released even after habeas corpus review.  Now the American President  can spy on his own people without accountability, without regard to any law. 

There is some general moaning and groaning in the US about all this.  And not much else.  But for those hysterical, hand-wringing leftwing traitors … whose voices are studiously ignored.

In the rest of the world, we are only beginning to understand the consequences of America’s loss of moral authority.  The American people are victims of their own passivity.  The suffering that this will bring upon them will not be as desperate as that of the people of Zimbabwe.  Sudan.  The Democratic Republic of Congo.  Iraq.  Afghanistan.  Guantanamo Bay.  And more.  Not for quite awhile.

And what Glenn Greenwald said.

UPDATE:  The US is not always so uncomfortable keeping company with Russia and China:

The moral center of humanity slowly asserts itself. Only the most powerful are too afraid to join.

You may have missed the news: At the end of May, 111 nations, including, at the last minute, Great Britain, showing the world the power of an unleashed conscience, agreed to an international ban on cluster bombs, surely one of the cruelest and, given the nature of war today, most unnecessary weapons in modern arsenals.

Among those not endorsing the treaty and MIA at the conference in Dublin where it was debated were Russia, China, Israel and, to the surprise of no one, the United States of George Bush, that increasingly isolated moral rump state of which so many are so ashamed. Indeed, the treaty is widely seen as a “diplomatic defeat” for the U.S., so identified is the Bush administration with the sanctity of its WMD.

Above the Law

Vladimiro Montesinos, an intelligence officer under former Peruvian authoritarian President Alberto Fujimori, who is being tried on corruption and human rights charges, gave brief testimony on June 30th:

[He] said that he had participated in phone tapping since 1974, which led to the Public Prosecutor’s question, “Do you mean to say that for matters of state crimes can be committed?” Montesinos firmly responded “yes.”

[emphases mine]

Shortly thereafer, Montesinos invoked his right to silence:

Montesinos has a powerful incentive to keep quiet. Already serving up to 20 years for crimes including corruption and running guns to Colombian rebels, he faces a 35-year sentence in a separate trial if convicted of organizing the death squad.

The president and spymaster will try to avoid incriminating each other, Prosecutor Avelino Guillen predicted Thursday in an interview with Peru’s CPN radio network. But he also said the court has enough evidence to prove that “Fujimori, from the beginning of his regime, put Montesinos in charge of creating a parallel strategy of dirty war” to confront terrorism. He said they had acted as “co-governors.”

Their courtroom encounter, to be broadcast live on Peruvian television, is sure to be dramatic. It will be their first meeting since Fujimori fired Montesinos in September 2000 when a videotape surfaced showing the spymaster bribing a congressman for political support.

From Fujimora on Trial:

Some lawyers, such as José Ugáz Sáchez-Moreno, have said that “Both know that their judicial survival depends on the mutual refusal to incriminate the other. Both defenses have surely been in contact and have sought a deal for neither to jeopardize the other.”

On Alberto Fujimoro:

During the 1990s, under Fujimori’s direction, the Peruvian state became increasingly more authoritarian while claiming to be a procedural democracy. Draconian anti-terrorist laws promulgated by executive decree in 1992 created a dragnet for silencing dissents. At the same time, the paramilitary group Colina carried out some of Peru’s worst massacres, including those that occurred in the neighborhood of Barrios Altos (the extrajudicial execution of 12 people at a local party in 1991) and the University of Cantuta (the extrajudicial execution of 8 students and a professor in 1992). Both tragedies supposedly occurred because it was believed that the victims were members of the Shining Path and both cases, which rise to the level of crimes against humanity, would eventually be heard by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In fact, the majority of cases brought to the Inter-American System against Peru pertain to events that occurred during Fujimori’s regime.

[emphasis mine]

Fujimoro faces trial and sentencing on two charges of human rights violations and corruption and usurpation and abuse of authority charges and also a possible five -year sentence for the illegal phone tapping of people who opposed him – politicians, business people, journalists and others. 

I wonder if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are following this trial.

Desperation & Anger

The Calmative Before the Storm:

Ours is a social system spinning wildly out of control. Wherever one glances, the political-economic-ecological crises engulfing late capitalism are insolvable in terms of structural reforms that might mitigate the system’s approaching zero hour. Call it the proverbial band-aid over gangrene syndrome; a plethora of terminal “fixes” that fix nothing.

During periods of extreme crisis, ruling class elites and the technocratic “wizards of armageddon” who serve them – bankrupt authoritarians without authority – harbor a not-so-secret longing for “magic bullets” that will put things right.

Thus, the quixotic crusade by politicians, military planners and corporate grifters out to make a buck to discover what they hope will be an antidote to the spreading virus of desperation and anger gripping the planet as the alleged “beautiful world” promised by neoliberalism morphs into an unlimited–and endless–low-intensity “war on terror” waged against the world’s poor.

–  Tom Burghardt

Strange Bedfellows

Joan Walsh “Betrayed by Obama”:

I actually have some sympathy for Obama. He was never the great progressive savior that his fans either thought he was, or peddled to their readers. While Arianna Huffington and Markos Moulitsas and Tom Hayden were hyping him as the progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton, Obama was getting away with backing a healthcare bill less progressive than Clinton’s, adopting GOP talking points on the Social Security “crisis” and double-talking on NAFTA. So why shouldn’t he think his “friends on the left” will put up with his abandoning other progressive causes?

I share Ms Walsh’s view of Obama.  Always have.  But, of course, the responsibility for the passage of the FISA legislation is not Obama’s alone.

Glenn Greenwald:

Historians writing about the Bush era were given a great gift yesterday — an iconic headline that explains so much of what has happened in this country over the last seven years:

Senate bows to Bush, approves surveillance bill

Their rationale for doing that is that it prevents the Republicans from depicting them as “weak,” because nothing exudes strength like bowing.

[…]

Yesterday’s episode also illustrates why I’ve been so ambivalent about campaigns such as those to demand that John Yoo lose his tenure. Although Yoo ought to be far outside of the mainstream of American political thought, he simply isn’t. The Democratic-led Congress yesterday just passed a bill by a wide margin that institutionalized Yoo’s signature theory — namely, that when the President orders something, then it is legal and proper, even if it’s against what Congress calls “the law.”

Why should we pretend that John Yoo is some sort of grotesque authoritarian aberration when his defining belief in presidential omnipotence is, to varying degrees, shared by the leaders of both parties? Yoo has long been mocked for his belief that the President — simply by uttering the magical phrase “National Security” — has the power to break the law, but Congress, yesterday, just passed a bill grounded in exactly that premise.

There are many things that one can say about what the Democrats did yesterday. Claiming that they showed how “strong” they are, or avoided being depicted by Republicans as “weak,” isn’t one of them.

[…]

John Cole makes the always-important point that to say that Democrats “surrendered” on this bill gives them too much credit in many cases. While some Democrats vote for measures like this out of standard, craven political fear, many — perhaps most — do so because they simply believe in the National Security and Surveillance State.  

On a more positive note, Howie Klein writes about (and lists) the 12 members of Congress and Congressional candidates who will receive $1,000 checks each from our Blue America fund for having stood very firm on the FISA bill. The list begins with Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd, and includes members of Congress from red states who nonetheless voted against the bill (Sen. Jon Tester of Montana); vulnerable freshmen who voted NAY (Rep. Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire); House members who are running for the Senate in tough states yet also voted NAY (Tom Allen in Maine and Rep. Tom Udall in New Mexico); and challengers who have been outspoken against telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping (Darcy Burner in Washington, Jim Hines in Connecticut and Rick Noriega in Texas).

Finally, this afternoon I’m going to interview Jameel Jaffer, the Director of the ACLU National Security Project, regarding the constitutional challenge the ACLU intends to bring against the FISA bill. I will post the podcast later this afternoon when it’s available. It’s important to recognize that yesterday’s defeat is not the end of anything. It should only fuel more resolute and resourceful battles in defense of these core political values.

It’s difficult for “outsiders” like me not to lose faith in the project that is America.  If not for Glenn Greenwald and people like him, for instance, the broad coalition that has formed to keep the FISA crimes before the American public by coordinating the Strange Bedfellows Money Bomb, I’d have to give my “faith” a respectful burial.

Footnote:  My critique of American politics should not be mistaken for a statement of confidence in the political governors of Canada.  There is no reason for such confidence.  The latest evidence that such confidence would be misplaced is the performance of our “leader” at the G8 summit and his continuing lack of concern about the treatment of Canadian child soldier Omar Khadr by the US government and the US military at Guantanamo Bay.  I hold the Canadian government responsible, by their silence and lack of action, for his torture.  Stephen Harper takes his orders from George W. Bush.  We are a colony of a foreign Empire again.  It just has a new name.

It’s sad.  It’s all so sad.  Let’s change it.  YES WE CAN!