Watch for those guys in the new administration. They are still hell-bent on improving your social morality and your political culture. Never mind that the improvement of the state of your morality and politics is not on your mind this week as you prepare to celebrate the New Year, or that you had never at any time in the past reached out to these well-meaning folks and asked them to help you along in that endeavor.
But, yep, you want to know right from wrong, check with George, Condi, Don, Paul, Dick, et. al. because they know what’s best for you. And never mind that we had been around the block a few times, learning our poli-sci lessons the hard way, at the whetstone of activist experience, with some of us ending up either in jail, hunted down or in exile, because we had felt so strongly about the issue that we tried to do something about it.
But the US, I say, is hell-bent on “introducing” you and me to Jeffersonian principles of civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, political rights, democratic rights and heck, name the rights, and these bozos will take them out from under their armpit and hand them over to you like a bouquet of roses. Seriously, folks, the issue here is not the intrinsic worth of these values, which clearly are a necessary function of the growth of any vibrant society, but the hypocrisy and nuttiness of American foreign policy in our part of the world.
First, the hypocrisy. As the US earnestly went about promoting its master plan for democracy, justice and freedom in our part of the world, it concurrently singled out Palestine to deny that same democracy, freedom and justice through its backing there of the military occupation of one people by another, and vetoing over the years every conceivable UN Security Council resolution advanced by the international community, including America’s own allies, to put a stop to Israel’s brutal practices, and bring to an end its presence, in the occupied territories.
A case in point: In December 200, the Bush administration caused some consternation and bewildered head-scratching among its European allies when it vetoed a Security Council Resolution submitted by the EU calling for implementation of the Mitchell Plan, and efforts to reduce violence by the dispatch of international monitors to the region — a plan devised by Washington’s own peace envoy. Ten days before the veto, the US boycotted a conference in Geneva of the High Contracting Parties of the Geneva Conventions to review the situation in Palestine. With the boycott, the conference went bust — in the sense that its decisions were blocked from implementation. The decisions? The conference reaffirmed that the Fourth Geneva Conventions apply to the West Bank and Gaza, and that Israel’s actions there, backed and funded by Washington, relating to land expropriation, population transfer, the “willful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, extensive destruction and appropriation of property carried out unlawfully and wantonly,” are war crimes under international law, indeed US law.
So would you buy a used car, or a master plan for democracy, from this hypocritical salesman? Not by a long shot. At a conference on Middle East democracy in Morocco Dec. 1, attended by representatives from 30 countries, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, it would appear, according to media accounts, that Arab officials, along with delegates from nongovernmental groups, universally focused on how US policies in Palestine and Iraq were responsible for planting the seeds of terrorism in the region. But US officials rejected that, and Arab officials rejected the rejection.
“Some Arab officials,” reported Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, “have privately said they attended mainly because they did not want to annoy the Americans.” Added Kessler: “Some participants in preparatory discussions even advocated calling for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to be tried for war crimes.” That’s how strongly we feel about the issue.
Now the nuttiness — the kind you get when you mix equal parts deceit, bully-pulpit swagger and brazenness in a blender and frappe well. In that regard, consider what Thomas L. Friedman revealed in his commentary last week. Friedman, The New York Times columnist who devotes a great deal of his writing to Middle Eastern affairs, provokes strong passions among Arabs, who see him, depending on their perspective, either as a fair and perceptive political analyst, or as a snake, a closet anti-Arab bigot. Well, my passions got mighty juiced up when I read what he had to say last week. (Read his piece in the Times, which appeared De. 16, and weep.)
Let’s backtrack a bit here. You may recall that UN-sponsored document, “Arab Human Rights Development Report 200,” composed entirely by a group of distinguished Arab intellectuals who had placed their societies under a sympathetic but critical examination, exposing strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats, about the Arab world in a way that perhaps only Arabs should. The report, you may recall further, received a lot of attention in the American and European media, and was debated endlessly in the Arab media, most notably for its frankness about why Arab society had remained stuck behind the times. The report was so widely read on the Internet that it was unloaded a million times. Then the same group of experts came out with another report the following year, to equally sweeping acclaim. The third report, sponsored by the same UN agency, the UN Development Program and again written by a group of qualified academics, social scientists and economists chosen by the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, was due out last October and awaited with eagerness because, allegedly, it was going to tackle the issue of political governance, institutional failure and political stagnation in the Arab world. So Friedman, along with the rest of us, waited.
“I waited,” he says. “And I waited, but nothing.” Then what? “Then I started to hear disturbing things,” Friedman wrote last week, “that the Bush team saw a draft of the Arab governance report and objected to the prologue, because it was brutally critical of the US invasion of Iraq and the Israeli occupation. This prologue constitutes 10 percent of the report.”
So what’s the administration’s gig here? “(T)he Bush team is apparently insisting that language critical of America and Israel be changed — as if language ten times worse can’t be heard on Arab satellite TV everyday. And until it’s changed, the Bush folks are apparently ready to see the report delayed or killed altogether.”
So there you have it, folks. Nutty and then some. Is there a smoke-and-mirror game here that the US is playing in the region? Is it playing us for the fools it thinks we are? Has it played center too long now that it feels entitled as an imperium to determine what we should and should not read?
I don’t know what it’s playing. Explain it to me, dear reader, because, I’ll find an explanation of the Stonehenge mystery and what those enigmatic Easter Island heads are saying before I can explain such a petulant posture by a country that dubs itself the greatest exporter of, eh, what is it, that’s right, democracy — which I take it means I’m able to read and write what I darn well please. So sneer along with me, will you?
