Supporting human rights is in our self-interest

Below is an essay I wrote July 2002. I am posting it here because I will refer to it in future essays...

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During the Cold War, the United States supported countless brutal dictatorships. This was not because the US liked to support brutal dicatorships or because the "land of the free" want to try out hypocrisy, but rather because of a simple intellectual error. The rhetorical basis for the Cold War was this: "communism is evil and totalitarian, therefore the anti-communism [the opposite of communism] is good and democratic [the opposite of evil and totalitarian]."

I won't go into a boring explanation of mathematical logic but even an attentive middle school math student should be able to tell you that this is a logically flawed conclusion to draw from the given premise

Communism was undoubtedly evil and totalitarian. It gave the world the horrors of the Maoist and Stalinist purges, the Gulag, the Stasi, the brutal crushing of the Prague Spring and of Budapest. But the so-called fight against anti-communism gave the world comparable horrors. Argentina's Dirty War, Augusto Pinochet, the Salvadoran death squads.

Samuel Doe was dictator of Liberia for almost all of the 1980s. If he weren't a dictator, he might be confused with some cartoonish bufoon. In reality though, Doe's brutality was as horrific as that of Uganda's infamous Idi Amin Dada. The main difference was that Amin's posturing and anti-British and anti-Israel propaganda invited international media scrutiny on his regime's horrors; Doe generally kept his mouth shut and thus was allowed to torture and brutalize in peace. Doe allowed the United States to set up a series of transmitters to allow Voice of America to broadcast more reliably to Africa, back when the Cold War powers were waging proxy wars in places like Angola and Mozambique. As a result, Doe was sickeningly lauded for his "human rights" record by then President Ronald Reagan.

I recently read an article in the Montreal paper Le Devoir on the aftereffects of the Guatemalan civil war and genocide. During several decades, there was a civil war in Guatemala between the American backed military regimes and the anti-communist rebels. The regime said they need to fight the communists to save the country. A UN commission determined that over 90% of the human rights abuses during the civil war were committed by the government (anti-communist) forces. They were trying to save the country from what? During the war, entire villages of Mayan indians were annihiliated by the forces of "law and order" in what is not generally recognized to be a genocide. This is not dissimiliar to the actions of their anti-communist comrades in El Salvador, where right-wing death squads murdered such "Marxist" threats as 4 American Catholic nuns as well as Archbishop Oscar Romero, the leading advocate for peace of that time (who was assassinated in the cathedral while saying Mass!).

Many Americans do not understand why people in other countries do not see us as the same paragon of goodness and virtue as we tend to see ourselves. After supporting criminals like Pinochet and the genociders, is it really shocking "what America represents" means something different to Chileans and Guatemalans (and many others) than it does to Americans? "Why do they hate us?" Easy, just look what happened to them and who was involved.

Why does this matter now? Because try replacing communists with Islamists. (Note: a Muslim is someone who believes in Islam; an Islamist is someone who believes that radical Islam should become the state-imposed theocratic political structure, usually by any means necessary). We're seeing many of the same parallels with our current war, we're seeing the possibility of history repeating itself. We support oppresive anti-democratic regimes in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Guess where all of the 9/11 hijackers came from: Saudi Arabia and Egypt. To them, we don't represent freedom and liberty and all the other virtues we like to brag about; we represent the government that is in bed with the corrupt Saudi monarchy and Egyptian dictatorship.

Some say that unpleasant political alliances are an unfortunate fact of geopolitical life. The latter is true. However, something else is also true: alliances can have consequences, not always good. This is not just self-righteous moralizing by some well-meaning but naive neophyte. It's in our self-interest to choose our allies very carefully. Democratic allies are almost invariably more stable (because they have a popular basis for the governance) and more reliable (because the rule of law tends to favor predictable outcomes).

The unilateralist foreign policy establishment of this country has to learn that if you say one thing and do another, it's going to piss a lot of people off. If those people that our bad policies have pissed off get access to hijacked planes or smallpox or chemical weapons, we're in a lot of trouble. You'd think they would have realized this on 11 Sept.