Le Peuple, C'est Moi

It happened that when this meme was posted on Facebook today I was listening to the left economist Richard Wolff's radio program, and in comparing feudalism, capitalism, and communism Wolff kept referring to what a communist society "is" like. But there are no existing communist societies, are there? It's like talking about a unicorn society/economy.

I agree with Michael Parenti on that point. Any real-world socialist or communist society will be tainted by reality. Which probably explains why the "No True Scotsman" move is as popular among socialists and communists as it is among Christians and scientists: confronted with serious problems, they just say "But that's not real socialism!" And maybe they're right.

I haven't read much Parenti. But if he's excusing real crimes and atrocities by real-world socialist governments, that won't do either. I've often talked to people who do that, and they too point to an ideal, pie-in-the-sky socialism that won't and can't ever exist. We have to criticize the crimes of socialist regimes as doggedly as (I hope) we criticize the crimes of capitalist regimes. I support the Cuban Revolution, for example, but I'm critical of the imprisonment of homosexuals there. One important difficulty, of course, is getting accurate information about those places when the air is full of propaganda. The same is true of Venezuela: I'm perfectly willing to criticize Maduro, but in order to do that I have to have accurate information about what he's doing, and the US corporate media publish an endless stream of lies about him and his predecessor Hugo Chavez.  Some of the accusations might turn out to be accurate, but many are certainly false. 

I also know that the US government, not only Trump but Obama and Bush before him, care nothing about the rights and freedoms of Venezuelans, so I know that their attempts to remove Maduro aren't motivated by concern for human rights.  For that reason I'm not interested in criticizing Maduro until the US and their clients stop trying to strangle Venezuela, and that is not likely to happen.  Since any criticisms I could make of Maduro could only serve to justify further US violence in Venezuela, I'm not particularly interested in trying to evaluate the accusations against him, let alone join the chorus of toadies denouncing him.

In the economist Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom (Knopf, 1999, 151), he wrote:

Are the citizens of third world countries indifferent to political and democratic rights? This claim, which is often made, is again based on too little empirical evidence ... The only way of verifying this would be to put the matter to democratic testing in free elections with freedom of opposition and expression -- precisely the things that the supporters of authoritarianism do not allow to happen. It is not clear at all how this proposition can be checked when the ordinary citizens are given little political opportunity to express their views on this and even less to dispute the claims made by the authorities in office. The downgrading of these rights and freedoms is certainly part of the value system of the government leaders in many third world countries, but to take that to be the view of the people is to beg a very big question.

Indeed, Sen continues:

It is thus of some interest to note that when the Indian government, under Indira Gandhi’s leadership, tried out a similar argument in India, to justify the “emergency” she had misguidedly declared in the mid-1970s, an election was called that divided the voters precisely on this issue. In that fateful election, fought largely on the acceptability of the “emergency,” the suppression of basic political and civil rights was firmly rejected, and the Indian electorate—one of the poorest in the world—showed itself to be no less keen on protesting against the denial of basic liberties and rights than it was in complaining about economic poverty. To the extent that there has been any testing of the proposition that poor people in general do not care about civil and political rights, the evidence is entirely against that claim. Similar points can be made by observing the struggle for democratic freedoms in South Korea, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma (or Myanmar) and elsewhere in Asia. Similarly, while political freedom is widely denied in Africa, there have been movements and protests about that fact whenever circumstances have permitted, even though military dictators have given few opportunities in this respect.

In principle, existing self-identified socialist governments are valid targets for criticism just as existing capitalist governments are, and anyone who claims otherwise is arguing in bad faith. It seems to me that apologists for socialist regimes oscillate between "Those reports are false - imperialist, counterrevolutionary propaganda!" and "Those reports are true, but the comrades don't want your bourgeois human rights! They're happy to sacrifice themselves [and others] for the Revolution!" And that's a giveaway.  To repeat: mainstream news media promulgate US propaganda against official enemies, which makes it hard to criticize their abuses fairly.  When someone agrees that abuses are happening and justifies them in the name of the Revolution, however, then the question of the reliability of the reports has already been set aside by the revolutionary apologists. 

I don't know where Parenti comes down on this question.  His basic point seems valid if I understand it correctly: a real-world socialist government will be flawed.  But that's exactly why it would be necessary to criticize it.  Many criticisms will be invalid, in bad faith, unrealistic.  There's no way to decide which are bad in advance, so the hard work of informing ourselves and making judgments, with full awareness of our own limitations, can't be shirked.

Anyone who treats criticism as improper in principle might as well work for the US government or its subordinate states: the playbook is the same.  Noam Chomsky likes to point out that when US media talk about the "national interest," they are referring to the interests of the richest people, a tiny minority of the population.  Likewise, when many socialists (I'm not going to judge whether they're "real" socialists or not) speak of "the people," what they mean are small groups of revolutionary elites.  So be it; but let's be clear about it.

Legitimize Me All Night Long

The US/DPRK summit has enraged a lot of people in the US, and one of their favorite themes is that Trump "legitimized" Kim Jong Un by meeting with him.  I've seen many complaints about North Korea's undeniably bad human rights record, almost all of them from people who have nothing to say about the undeniably bad human rights records of so many US friends, allies, and clients.  When Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia visited Washington, for example, he was fawned on by Democrats and Republicans alike, by the full range of American corporate media, and hailed as a "reformer."  (This is typical of elite US reception of right-wing dictators for a century or more.)  Justin Trudeau and the Canadian establishment followed suit. The word "legitimize" was not to be heard, as far as I know, though it surely applied.

So, Glenn Greenwald wrote contemptuously today: "US foreign policy elites have invented a whole slew of meaningless phrases to justify a state of permanent militarism & aggression in the world, then trained people to recite them. That US should avoid negotiating with Bad Guys because it gives them 'legitimacy' in a good example".  He continued: "It's critically important that the country which lavishes the Saudi regime with weapons, intelligence, diplomatic cover, and constant praise not do anything to give legitimacy to dictators."

Someone calling himself "Vincent Adultman" riposted: "So is giving weapons, intelligence, diplomatic cover and praise to Saudi Arabia wrong, or is legitimizing dictators OK? Which lane are you picking?"

The most obvious point is that Greenwald doesn't endorse "giving weapons, intelligence, diplomatic cover and praise to Saudi Arabia."  Not only Trump, but most of the American political and chattering classes do favor doing so, however.  The question for such people, then, is why they don't favor giving the same benefits to Kim Jong Un; as a brutal dictator with no regard for human rights, he would seem to qualify.

Nor, as far as I know, does Greenwald believe the US should treat North Korea like Saudi Arabia.  Nor do I.  The Onion recently mocked the very idea.  The two cases are dissimilar in many ways.  Unlike Saudi Arabia, North Korea is not attacking another nation or creating a vast humanitarian catastrophe with US support.  The only country North Korea has attacked is South Korea, which is not a separate nation, in 1950; that was a civil war, not a war between nations.  I would certainly oppose the US giving or selling weapons or technology to North Korea, but I doubt Trump or most of the US political and business community have any such reservations.  I think the only nation, except perhaps Japan, that feels threatened by North Korea's nuclear weapons is the US, because of our own paranoiac fantasies.  Like much (most?) of the world, North Korea has much better reason to feel threatened by the US.

I believe that Vincent Adultman was trying for a version of a popular attempt to flummox those who oppose the US starting another aggressive war: Don't you libs want the US to "intervene" in Saudi Arabia?  Aren't you always complaining about the human rights in American client states? So why do you now object if the US bombs Kosovo, Iraq, Libya?  You have a double standard.  This line is often accompanied by a admission that America has not always got it right before, but this time we'll do it right.  Shouldn't we at least try?  Can't you just give America another chance?  I've heard this sort of thing at least since the US invasion of Panama in 1989, though I'm sure it's older, and every time it quickly became clear not only that America had blown another chance to get it right, but that our leaders didn't care.  They had other concerns on their agenda.

Here we come to another popular buzzword, "whataboutism" (or "whataboutery").  It comes in handy when someone points out real hypocrisy and double standards in US policy and conduct.  Given that we're not talking about parallels that are distant in time but are quite recent, it seems entirely fair to ask why it was horrible for Trump to meet Kim Jong Un but not Mohammed bin Salman, especially when meeting and praising Kim Jong Un is decried as an atrocity unprecedented in American history.  Some of these preachers get a bit testy when they're corrected as to the American record, too.  But then they never meant to be taken literally.

Admittedly, nobody can denounce, let alone work effectively against every bad thing in the world.  But think of all the nice, sincere liberals I interacted with online who were distraught over wounded Syrian children and asked why America couldn't do something about them.  When I asked them, they mostly said they didn't know what we could do, though some were up for bombing Syria (and some others didn't say so, I suspect, because they knew it would sound bad).  I then asked them what they thought about wounded Yemeni children, since the US is partly responsible for their suffering and could mitigate or even stop it simply by stopping our direct support for Saudi aggression.  None answered, and most of them stopped posting even about Syrian children before long, thanks to the famous American short attention span.  Even granting that nobody can do everything, how hard could it be to admit that US involvement in killing and starving Yemeni children is a problem, and maybe post a meme denouncing that involvement?  And pretending that Trump's behavior is unprecedented makes life easier by erasing all the other evils you need to keep track of, doesn't it?

Whataboutism has an honorable history, going back to Martin Luther King Jr.'s declaration in 1967:

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

It becomes a dishonest tactic when the comparison is invalid, as they often are. Vincent Adultman provided a good example: he seemed to think that Greenwald was being inconsistent in denouncing US support for Saudi aggression while favoring peace in the Korean peninsula.  Another example is someone who responded to Greenwald's criticism of US commentators who "really believe that the US owns, or at least is entitled to exercise supreme dominion over, the Korean Peninsula."  Someone called Bohique replied: "I have not heard you reporting on the concentration camps Trump is setting up in Texas. Have you seen thebimages [sic] of children in cages? Maybe that will give you better context."  Of course Greenwald has criticized the viciously inhumane US immigration policy, going back at least to the days when it was Obama's policy.  I presume that Bohique was alluding to North Korean prison camps, on the assumption that US should exercise supreme dominion over the Korean peninsula because of them.  Leaving aside that there's no reason to believe that the US government or most mainstream pundits care about human rights (except when pretending to care for propaganda purposes), I don't see how US Korea policy has, or could, produce any improvement in North Korea's behavior.  But then it's not meant to.

You could go with Arash Karami, who very properly wrote today, "I can’t believe North Korea negotiated with a regime that just helped launch another catastrophic bombing campaign against Yemen."

Blood and Pleasure

Glenn Greenwald and a few other malcontents have been poking at the outrage expressed in respectable circles over President Trump's alleged "affection for totalitarian leaders [which] has grown beyond Russia’s president to include strongmen around the globe."

Very entertainingly, the Washington Post article by Philip Rucker I just linked has been altered, adding the words in bold type to make it somewhat less obviously absurd: "Every American president since at least the 1970s has used his office at least occasionally to champion human rights and democratic values around the world."  As Greenwald says, it's still not true.

But then, these claims shouldn't be taken literally.  Nor should most mainstream political discourse.  They are declarations of faith, pledges of allegiance.  In the anthropologist F. G. Bailey's terminology, they are examples of the moral mind at work.  By paying tribute to America's high ideals and practice, one establishes one's bona fides and qualification to participate in serious commentary.

Even non-mainstream commentators feel the need to say such things.  I've often referred to the late Molly Ivins's lament from 2007:

What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn't supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny? Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?

Ivins certainly knew better than this.  (Which probably can't be said for Phillip Rucker.)  I daresay she'd have turned her considerable powers of mockery on any Republican who'd said such things.  But before you can oppose a war, or criticize your President's fondness for dictators, you have to wave the flag.  So too Katha Pollitt felt compelled to assure her readers that she's "never been one to blame the United States for every bad thing that happens in the Third World" before criticizing US policy in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks.  (This ploy never deflects the criticism from jingoes, of course.)

Glenn Greenwald himself has come a long way, since he wrote in 2008:

Yes, I'm well aware that the U.S, like all countries, was deeply imperfect prior to 9/11, and that many of the systematic excesses of the Bush era have their genesis prior to 2001. The difference (a critical one) is that what had been acts of lawbreaking and violations of our national values have become the norm -- consistent with, rather than violative of, our express values and policies.

And this was in a fine post detailing and condemning Bush-era crimes.  At that time Greenwald still was a bit nervous about going too far out on the political spectrum; he's become much more comfortable since then, following facts and principles where they lead even if it infurates self-styled moderates.  He's posted a good article today on US support of dictators since World War II, though the policy is older than that.

Something else should be remembered, though: mainstream commentators, including (or especially) liberal ones, have always seen human rights as a bargaining chip to be used with "authoritarian" regimes rather than something desirable in themselves.  As Stephen Walt put it early in the Obama administration, "No U.S. President--not even Jimmy Carter--was ever willing to spend a lot of blood or treasure solely to advance human rights, and Obama isn't going to be the first."  This was quoted with approval (via) by Eyal Press, a writer at The Nation.  Notice the bit about "blood and treasure," a virtual Homeric epithet that tends to turn up when someone wants to pretend that doggone it, the US has just been too idealistic about defending human rights at home and abroad, and we can't afford to do it anymore.  Expending blood (of dusky foreigners) and treasure in the service of suppressing human rights, however, is just fine.

The Passion of the Moral Mind

Yo, Is This Racist? suddenly erupted onto my Facebook feed recently,* for the first time in months.

Anonymous asked: I came across this libertarian who said she didn't believe in women's rights but individual rights.  Is it safe to say she's a bigot?

Bigots, always think they’ve found some kind of rhetorical loophole that allows them to ignore the obvious nature of existing inequality, that the reason people who aren’t total pieces of shit support “women’s rights” or “black rights” or whatever, is because those groups of people (and others) have fewer rights than the people who control everything, and that allows them to pretend that people who want more equality in the world are over-reacting, or even that we need “men’s rights” or “white pride” or whatever.

It’s telling, however, that if someone only espouses any rhetoric about equality in support of the PEOPLE WHO ALREADY HAVE FUCKING POWER, they miiiiiiiiight just be complete piece of shit bigots, or, I guess, if you want to be nice, so fucking stupid and clueless that they’ve been fooled by this pathetic argument. Could be either, I guess.

It occurs to me that I haven't mentioned a book I read lately that I found really useful: The Tactical Uses of Passion: An Essay on Power, Reason, and Reality,** by the anthropologist F. G. Bailey.  I hope to read some more of his work, but what I want to bring from The Tactical Use of Passion is Bailey's distinction between what he calls "the moral mind" and "the civic mind":

The moral self excludes, we argued, ideas of right and duty.  But it is evident that such phrases as “not oneself” and “above oneself” make sense only if we measure performance against the rights and duties expected of the person.  In some of these cases displays of emotion (for example, being “beside oneself”) indicate a flaw in the self, an inadequacy.  A person who is beside himself is unable to undertake the responsibilities that normally attach to his status.  Often the judgment means that he is absolved from guilt: “He could not help it.”  Evidently this self, unlike the moral self, is validated by accounting procedures.  It is the “civic” self and it includes an element that is apart from emotions, either dominating them as a control or standing as a rival for the use of available avenues of expression.  In other words, the “civic” self signals that a mind is at work.  Let us look at situations in which this idea of the self controlling emotion (rather than being revealed in displays of emotion) appears [51].

... What reasons could be advanced to justify such an image of the weakness of rationality and the strength of passion?  First the moral self carries its own defenses in that it is rooted in the passions and is therefore immune to rational arguments.  It has a facility for twisting and rendering unintelligible negative messages from outside the relationship: a jamming device, so to speak.  This, too, is a kind of façade: a pretense that the real world can be left to go its own way.  It is also a shield keeping away what Weber calls” the cold skeletal hands of rational orders” and “the banality of everyday routine” [77] ...

I hope it will be fairly clear why Andrew Ti's outburst brought Bailey's discussion to mind.  Bailey doesn't consider the "the moral mind" to be bad; it's one way to organize and prepare for action.  "The civic mind" comes on the job when goals and directions have been decided by "moral" means, and it's time to figure out how to get to the goal.

The thing is, in a narrow technical sense, that Libertarian Lady was correct.  Civil Rights, for example, are rights of the individual, not rights of a group.  But facts should never get in the way of a good ragegasm.

So I take Ti to be exercising his moral mind, waxing passionate for Righteousness.  But my civic mind is at work now, and I'm reminded of some of Sartre's remarks on anti-Semitism and irrationality:

I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti-Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc."  Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies.  They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge.  But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.  The anti-Semites have the right to play.  They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.  They delight in act­ing in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.  If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.  It is not that they are afraid of being convinced.  They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.

I recognize the syndrome Sartre was writing about here, and I think this applies to Ti no less than to the "libertarian" he's discussing.

* To be honest, not all that recently.  I'm trying to clear out some posts from my backlog from the Drafts folder.

** Cornell University Press, 1983.

Keeping Up With the Chinese

Garance Franke-Ruta provided an entertaining account of Marco Rubio's speech at CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference).  I noticed something different than she did, though.  She was interested in Rubio and Rand Paul pandering to their right-wing audience, I was interested in something else.  The relevant passage:

"The Chinese government provides their people no access to the Internet. The Chinese government will hold citizens prisoner without any right to recourse. The Chinese government coerces and tortures people until they get confessions. The Chinese government restricts the ability of people to assemble. If you escape China, they actually put pressure on governments to forcibly return you. The Chinese government has coercive birth limitation policies, which means that in some cases they are forcing abortions and sterilizations. The Chinese government uses forced labor. And this is what they do to their own people.

"We want that to be the leading country in the world?"

"No!" replied the audience.

"We want that to be the leading voice on this planet?" Rubio continued.

"No!" came the cry.

Oh, my goodness!  Almost all the crimes Rubio lay at the feet of China are, in fact, part of the great phenomenon he calls America.  The US was built with forced labor, which has made a comeback in the prison-industrial complex.  Torture, forced confessions, the abolition of habeas corpus, extradition of political dissidents (or nowadays, simply killing them with drones), restriction of the freedom of assembly, even forced sterilization -- all are American traditions, and they're happening now.  As for restricting people's access to the Internet, that's been tried too.  All of these have been acceptable to conservatives of Rubio's stripe.  Do we want that to be the leading country in the world?  Do we want that to be the leading voice on the planet?

Canons to the Left of Me!

How Goes the Culture War? Roy Edroso asked sarcastically today, referring to some more conservatives who are whining that their side gets no respect, and in particular:

And at Power Line, Steven Hayward asks, "WHY IS THERE NO LIBERAL AYN RAND?" He's taking off from Beverly Gage who, slightly less stupidly, asks, "American conservatives have a canon. Why don’t American liberals?" Sure we have a canon -- it's called Western literature. And it beats the snot out of the sad, long-form political pamphlets wingnuts like to name-check. You will learn more about the human condition from the works of novelists, playwrights, and poets than you ever can from a thousand power freaks' blueprints for the mass production of Procrustean beds.

I don't think this works, but then I have to remember that Edroso's mission is to make fun of the monkeyshines of the Right in a Democratic-Party-friendly fashion, not to do any serious thinking.  Once in a while he tiptoes toward the precipice of criticizing Obama, but never goes too close.  Most obviously, the canon of Western literature is also claimed by conservatives, and rightly so, since that canon is a conservative product.  (As well as something of a fantasy: the canon looks different in each European country, both in its content and in how it's read, and the content changes over time within each national tradition.)  Edroso also has this hobbyhorse about art not being political, which would seem to conflict with his implication that the canon is more liberal than conservative.  He's right to make fun of the contemporary American Right's attempts to read their views into art and pop culture, but that's because the writers he's citing are sloppy thinkers.  As Joanna Russ once wrote, "To apply rigid, stupid, narrow, political standards to fiction is bad because the standards are rigid, stupid, and narrow, not because they are political." I admit it's tempting to believe that there's a connection between sloppy thought and the Right, but I've read too many sloppy liberals and leftists to take the idea very far.

For example, in an update to the post, he approvingly quotes a commenter:

Political philosophy is almost entirely a liberal project. In some sense liberal political philosophy fuckin' created Western political culture. Human rights grew entirely out of liberal institutions consciously advancing specific liberal political conceptions...

I suppose that "almost" saves the claim from being completely false.  Political philosophy in the West begins with Plato and Aristotle, neither of whom was what you'd call a liberal, and proceeds through centuries of thinkers who drew on them.  Perhaps what the commenter meant was "modern Anglo-American political philosophy," but even there, I think it would be more accurate to say that human rights grew out of individuals struggling to get institutions to advance their political conceptions, not all of which were "liberal" in the sense that Edroso and his regulars use the word.  Parochialism isn't limited to the Right, you see.

American universities, the guardians and gatekeepers of the canon in the US, were quite conservative institutions until after World War II, when the GI Bill funded higher education for a flood of people who'd never have been allowed in before, certainly not in such numbers.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1962, President Carl Bridenbaugh lamented the changes he saw occurring in the academic world. Himself from Protestant Middle America, Bridenbaugh deplored “the great mutation” in Clio’s profession that was occurring as the post-World War II GI Bill ushered into the undergraduate and graduate programs people who could not have gone to college in the Depression. “Many of the young practitioners of our craft, and those who are still apprentices,” Bridenbaugh lamented, “are products of lower middle-class or foreign origins, and their emotions not infrequently get in the way of historical reconstructions. They suffered from an “environmental deficiency” because they were urban-bred, rooted in the Old World traditions of their parents’ homelands, and therefore lacking in the “understanding … vouchsafed to historians who were raised in the countryside or in the small town.…They find themselves in a very real sense outsiders on our past and feel themselves shut out. This is certainly not their fault, but it is true.”

Almost everyone who heard or read Bridenbaugh’s references to urban, foreign-born outsiders, mutants tarnishing a noble profession, understood that he was talking about Jews. This was far from the last lamentation about the wholesale change in the recruitment of historians in a period of extraordinary growth in higher education. Bridenbaugh’s discomfort was shared widely because before World War II the history profession had been drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of middle- to upper-class white Protestant men [Gary B. Nash et al, History on Trial (Knopf, 1998), p. 54].

Stuff like this is a reminder why American academia underwent such upheavals in the 1960s, and the canon was opened to such abominations as Women's Studies and African-American Studies.  (Do I need to caption "abominations" for the irony-impaired?  If so, consider it captioned.)  Edroso's a lot younger than I am, so he may not be aware of the changes that occurred.  His politics-neutral claims about art indicate that he absorbed some reactionary rhetoric along the line, though detached from its earlier context.

Another commenter not quoted by Edroso wrote:

I am sure that if one were to cite as a liberal canon the works of Marx, Alinsky, Debs, Chomsky, Ilich, Mills, Veblen, Zinn, Sinclair, Gorz, and the like, Hayward wouldn't call them a commie or anything like that.

But as another pointed out, "that's a left canon, not a liberal one; the two concepts are somewhat different."  The same is true of George Orwell, whose anti-totalitarian stance has often been confused with pro-capitalism, especially by the Right.  A good many heroes and heroines of today's liberals don't seem to have been liberals, and were often vilified by liberals in their day.  It's as dishonest to claim Martin Luther King Jr., for example, for liberalism as it is to claim him for conservatism.  But both those factions want to bask in King's prestige: the best (or at any rate safest) role model is a dead role model.

On the Cusp of Bicuspidora

I'm in the middle of reading two or three books at once, and don't feel like writing much. So I'll just point to my old friend Ash Khalil's article on President Obama's evasive answer to a student's question about human rights in Gaza. Those who have exulted over Obama's superiority to Bush as a speaker should meditate on the opening sentence of his reply: "The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries, and it's an issue that elicits a lot of passions as you have heard." That's right down there with Bush fils and Bush pere when it comes to getting lost in the coils of grammar. The rest of his answer can be read here. No one could have predicted that he'd ever be asked such a question, I'm sure.

I also like this quotation from Stephen Walt in Ash's article:

“It’s not as if the dysfunctional condition of Israeli and Palestinian internal politics was a dark mystery when Obama took office,” wrote Harvard University professor Stephen Walt recently on the Foreign Policy Magazine website. “Did they ever ask themselves what they would do if Netanyahu dug in his heels, as anyone with a triple-digit IQ should have expected?”

It's a question that not only I but others have asked on numerous occasions before and since Obama took office. Did Obama and his Team of Rivals ever ask themselves how they would deal with the Republicans' hostility? Did they even imagine they'd have to deal with it? Did it ever occur to them that they should ask for more than they wanted in bargaining with opponents of their initiatives? Evidently not.

Human Rights for Me

A strange little column/post by Eyal Press at the Nation site, "Obama, Human Rights, and the Chutzpah of Conservatives." Oh, I guess it's not really strange, it's just typical liberal apologetics for U.S. human rights policy. Press begins by quoting Bret Stephens, a Wall Street Journal op-ed writer, who criticizes the Obama administration for not pushing other countries hard enough on human rights. Stephens enumerates the countries -- China, Sudan, Iran, and Burma -- he thinks need more pressure as opposed to "engagement." Not a word about Honduras, though, nor Israel. Well, Stephens has a lot of matters on his plate. He concludes:

It also takes a remarkable degree of cynicism—or perhaps cowardice—to treat human rights as something that "interferes" with America's purposes in the world, rather than as the very thing that ought to define them. Yet that is exactly the record of Mr. Obama's time thus far in office.

I can't remember a President before Obama who concerned himself with human rights, beyond talk. Generally this sort of complaint turns up during every administration, from whatever side happens to be out of power at the time. I recall Jimmy Carter being jeered at by conservatives for his professed concern with human rights: self-styled realists and pragmatists from Carter's right complained that a dogmatic concern with human rights would interfere with America's purposes in the world. Ronald Reagan, on taking office, "pushed to overturn an arms embargo imposed on Guatemala by Carter because of its ghastly human rights record." A writer in the liberal Washington Monthly allows that "Reagan's indifference to human rights abuses committed by the United States' erstwhile allies in Central America is an especially ugly stain on his presidency. Yet, as time progressed, there was one place where he did apply the logic of bringing human rights into public policy: the Soviet Union." Reagan was less concerned about human rights in China, though. And after the Tienanmen Square massacres of 1989, George H. W. Bush moved with indecent haste to restore most-favored nation trade status to China, "asserting that the U.S. must maintain a dispassionate view of world events when considering its own economic interests ... Industry reaction was predictably mixed, with textile lobbyists debunking the decision, apparel groups staying neutral and importers hailing it." Ongoing human rights violations in China didn't stop George W. Bush from personally attending the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Carter himself had been equally selective in his concern for human rights, from Latin America to the Indonesian slaughter in East Timor, which Carter's administration funded and supplied. (As did all of his successors through Bill Clinton.)

The "chutzpah" about human rights, then, is a bipartisan affair, as Eyal Press shows. "In this as on other matters, [Obama] has made it clear that he is a cautious realist, not a crusading idealist." Besides,

As Stephen Walt usefully points out at the Politico, which invited various analysts to assess whether Obama is "punting" on human rights: "Of course he is. No U.S. President--not even Jimmy Carter--was ever willing to spend a lot of blood or treasure solely to advance human rights, and Obama isn't going to be the first. And given that the U.S. record on this issue has been tarnished by Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, forced rendition, "enhanced interrogation" (aka torture), extra-judicial killings (aka "targeted assassinations"), our reaction to the Goldstone Report, and the thousands dead as a result of the invasion of Iraq, I'd say a bit of humility on this front was probably in order."

I'd agree that humility at least is in order, but notice that bit about being "willing to spend a lot of blood or treasure solely to advance human rights." It's such a typical evasion, used especially by liberals to defend their side's human rights violations, as if they'd like to do something about the madness but we can't be everywhere at once, and besides, don't you leftist pacifists always criticize the US for trying to be the cop of the world? (I believe that Obama himself used this trope to excuse his foot-dragging after the coup in Honduras.) The thing is that U.S. Presidents, including Jimmy Carter, have been quite willing to spend a lot of treasure and blood (primarily the blood of dusky foreigners) to violate human rights and suppress democracy around the world. The trouble isn't that we're reluctant to intervene in other countries' affairs, but that we very happily and consistently do so.