A Handy Rebuttal for the Human Rights Argument

Now that the Abu Ghraib scandal has rendered people more receptive to it, I'm reposting a rebuttal I wrote up for the "but we have to invade Iraq in order to save it!" argument. Use with my blessings on wavering co-workers, openminded conservative relatives, and Thomas L. Friedman.
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(originally posted in April 2003)

Since the human rights issue is the sole and only argument the pro-war camp has that appears (at first sight) to be legitimate, I thought I'd take a whack at it here. I don't expect to convince anyone who supports the war; if you're still behind "Operation Looting & Pillaging," then we're not really living in the same universe any more. This is because the question "What do we do about human rights abuses in other nations?" does deserve an answer, no matter how dishonest the person who's asking it might be.

First of all, it behooves us to remember that, in the context of "Operation Iraqi Obliteration," the human-rights argument is

Stolen Property

The pro-war folks who are currently expressing concern about the freedoms and rights of individuals living in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and whoever else ends up on our hit list are by and large the same people who didn't give a shit about said individuals three, five, or ten years ago. I cite as the prime example Donald Rumsfeld, who had no trouble wooing Saddam Hussein's regime while he was 'gassing his own people,' as they so love to repeat. Rummy didn't care about Saddam's "own people," he cared about the fact that Iraq was at war with Iran and Iran was our enemy. So if he was willing to help Saddam brutalize his own people in the mid-1980s, why is he now suddenly animated by tender concern for their welfare?

OK, so you can still make the argument that even if this new and startling concern for international human rights on the part of the right is expedient, it's still a good thing; after all, it has in fact gotten Saddam Hussein out of power. Well, you could, except for the fact that

Intentions Matter

Intentions matter because they affect results. The fact that our wars in the Middle East have not been driven by genuine concern for human rights has already produced catastrophic effects on the populations we were supposed to be assisting. The bombing campaigns in both Afghanistan and Iraq were made possible by massive contempt for the lives of Afghans and Iraqis. The assumption that drives all of our war planning is that American lives are worth much, much more than the lives of anyone else. That's why we always start with the air campaign, in which we first knock out the anti-aircraft defenses and then rain bombs down onto the country from a safe height. No matter how smart the bombs are, the killing on the ground has to be, to some extent, indiscriminate. The pilot may know his target, but he can't know who's in or near it. In Afghanistan we destroyed entire villages using this "better safe than sorry" approach. In Baghdad the civilian casualties have piled up so fast that the hospitals have stopped trying to keep track. The pro-war folks enjoy talking about how little civilian life has been lost in this war. Well, the pro-war folks don't know how much civilian life has been lost in this war, because they won't believe anyone but our military, and our military is not counting. They have already said quite openly that they have no plans to try to determine how many Iraqi people have died as a result of our invasion. That's how much they care about human rights in Iraq.

Once we get on the ground, we can do less damage, but it is still clear from the way we are now dealing with checkpoints in Iraq that our soldiers operate on the assumption that it is better to kill a dozen unarmed civilians than to risk the death of one U.S. soldier. Again, our lives are many, many times more valuable than those of the Iraqi people.

I'm sure many of the people who support this war feel that that's as it should be, and that protecting our own soldiers should be more important to us than protecting civilian life. All right, fine; you're entitled to your opinion. But if that's your opinion, then don't talk to me about your concern for human rights. Because to promote or even understand international human rights, you have to first understand that all human life is equally valuable. The way we fight our wars proves that we do not understand this basic principle--and therefore, we are ill-equipped to be the sole and only enforcers of human rights on Planet Earth.

So, it is clear and will only go on becoming clearer that invading a country, killing its citizens, and setting its cities on fire is not the best way to demonstrate concern for human rights. That still leaves the question--again, usually asked disingenuously, in this context--well,

What Should We Do?

Well, that all depends on how you define "we," doesn't it.

Traditionally, since World War II, the cause of international human rights has been championed by international organizations--the Unicef, Amnesty International, and so on--and by the United Nations. In fact, the whole point of the U.N. was supposed to be to create an international body that would be beholden to no one nation and which therefore could act in the best interests of humanity and the planet rather than the best interests of whatever nation-state happened to be top dog at the time. The "we" responsible for "doing something" about human rights in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and so on, is the United Nations. Not the United States, which as a global superpower interested in extending its own geopolitical influence is incapable of being an honest broker.

But the U.N. is impotent, you say. Yes, largely, it is...and whose fault is that?

For years, the most glaring example of the U.N.'s impotence has been its inability to impact U.S. policy. Reagan's shenanigans in Nicaragua were in direct violation of a decree from the World Court, but he never gave a shit. Bush I and Clinton at least made the effort to get the U.N. on board before they went into battle, even if this did have the effect of making the U.N. look like a rubber stamp for U.S. foreign policy. Israel, as many have pointed out over the past couple of years, is in flagrant violation of many U.N. resolutions and also has racked up one of the worst records of human rights violations for its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Israel continues on its way unchecked because it is backed by the U.S. and the U.S. has always been too powerful to be seriously inconvenienced by the U.N.

It is our refusal to be bound by the rules that we expect other nations to obey that has made the U.N. as impotent as it is. It is our conviction of our own divine right to do whatever we want no matter who else tells us it will cause suffering, death, and decades of disorder that has taken the "teeth" out of the U.N. Yes, the U.N. is impotent. We like it that way.

After all, if there actually were an impartial, effective international body capable of protecting international human rights against those who would abuse them, the U.S. would be in serious trouble. We would have to close the School of the Americas, for one thing. We would no longer be able to advance our foreign policy through assassinations and coups, by promoting civil wars and installing and supporting pro-Western dictators, by arming third-world countries to the teeth so that when the Soviet Union we were so concerned about in the 1980s finally collapses the buffer states we armed have nothing to do with the weapons but use them on each other. We would no longer be able to 'go it alone.' Sometimes, we would have to accept the fact that we could not do something because the rest of the world agreed that it was wrong.

And who wants that? Only people who care more about human rights than they care about American supremacy.

So I'll tell you what we do about it. We start by accepting the fact that we cannot dictate to the entire planet. Then we work with the U.N. instead of against it to get to the point where it can actually do its job. We apologize for violating every international treaty we signed under the Clinton administration and work to repair the broken bonds with other nations. We admit that we do not have the right to invade the entire Middle East simply because we sustained one major terrorist attack on American soil 18 months ago. We actually join the @$@#$!! international community, and we make the solving of problems like human rights in Syria a real, honest, and effective joint effort.

That's what we do about it. Or, that's what we should do about it. But we'll never actually do that. Because in order to give up what we would have to give up in order to protect human rights around the world, our government would really have to care about human rights. And, as we can clearly see, it doesn't.
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Truer now than it was even then,

The Plaid Adder