I have a post up at the Guardian blog noting that with no activity on its weblog on the last six weeks, the manifesto itself closed to new signatures and nobody so much as remarking its second anniversary, the Euston Manifesto appears to have gone the way of all flesh and most leftwing political tendencies. I suggest, perhaps a little uncharitably, that the cause of death (which I suppose I might be premature in announcing, but really, it doesn’t seem to have much life in it) was the Manifesto Group’s consistent refusal to ever move on from their platforms and slogans to having any concrete program at all[1] (and that this was in its turn probably due to the need to keep together a coalition which, in as much as it extended beyond a very small clique of pro-war ex-Trots, had very little to hold it together other than a personal dislike of George Galloway). If I had the piece to write again, I suspect I might have given more airtime to the other big psychological impetus behind the Paul Berman/Euston/”Decent” tendency, which was genuine trauma at the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks. But I certainly wouldn’t walk away from my assessment of the central motivation – a desire on the part of people who had been wrong for decades during the Cold War to be on the right side of history for once.
In terms of their contribution to British political debate, my epitaph for the Euston Manifesto is basically Byron’s on Castlereagh. For whatever reasons, as a political movement it was never able to get over the personality issues involved, and chose to promote its views by the same tactics of condemnation, excommunication and inflated rhetoric which had served it so badly during its past on the left[2]. But the current of political thought that Euston represented in the UK was not entirely bad or even entirely wrong. What would their legacy be?
The one thing I think we can safely ignore from the Eustonian legacy is the intellectual heritage of Paul Berman. The Euston Manifesto can certainly be regarded as the avatar of “Terror and Liberalism” on this side of the Atlantic, and most of the bits in it about “universalism”, which in context means “aggressive condemnation of Muslims for being racist and sexist” have their roots in Berman.
That is to say, it’s not an original insight of Paul Berman’s that Islam[3] is racist, sexist and homophobic, or that this is bad. Berman’s unique contribution was to view the badness of Islamic sexism, racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia as an extremely pressing and urgent political problem, on a par with Nazism during the 1930s or Communism during the Cold War. To coin a phrase of Nick Cohen’s, the ideological opposition between Islamism and liberal democracy is The Greatest Intellectual Struggle Of Our Time[4].
Although the analogies between Islamism, Nazism and Communism as political philosophies are interesting and maybe even valid, this whole political edifice falls down on the observable fact that the struggles against Nazism and Communism were politically important because of the size and military power of Germany, Russia and China, and there is no remotely similar Islamist power anywhere in the world. It’s also possible to go on and note that in acting on Berman’s inspiration, the neoconservatives and their leftwing allies had a tendency to go out and repeat verbatim all the worst mistakes of the Cold War[5], from quagmirish wars to pointlessly bellicose anti-diplomacy, but this is by the by; once one’s noted the central factual mistake at the heart of this view, there’s really not much more to be done but shrug and move on, leaving to the critics of literature to explain how it was that Berman’s literary talents obscured such a howling error and made it look to so many like a triumph of insight.
So leaving aside the bringing of “Terror and Liberalism” to these shores, we have the central doctrine of humanitarian interventionism, and Atlanticism. Of the second of these two, there’s not much to be said, or at least not by me. Atlanticism will always be with us as long as America’s the globa hegemon and as long as the UK sees its long term strategic interests in remaining a favoured junior partner of that hegemon. All that can really be done about it is to occasionally remind the more enthusiastic proponents that they are never going to amount to more than a sparrow on top of an elephant pretending to give directions, and to try and keep us out of the worst ideas of the worst American governments.
The general project of humanitarian intervention, however, is one that deserves to survive Eustonism and hopefully will. Although David Milliband is probably correct to say that the doctrine has been discredited, probably for a generation, by the Iraq War (which was, of course, not a humanitarian intervention and should never have been sold as one, a misrepresentation for which the Eustonians have to take their share of responsibility), I’m not prepared to accept the counsel of despair that it’s intrinsically impossible to ever use Western military power to reduce the amount of avoidable suffering in the world. There have been, albeit rare and limited, success stories and it ought to be possible to learn from and build on those successes. That’s a debate worth having, and it’s worth continuing to think hard about how international institutions might be reformed to help expedite the process.
But of course, such a debate is never going to go anywhere if one has to start and finish it with a bunch of dogmatic assertions about the role of the USA in global governance, or if one’s going to try to gerrymander the process so as to support the latest major power foreign policy initiative to come down the track, or if one’s going to demand loyalty oaths galore from anyone before they can be deemed fit to listen to. All of which were the central flaws of the Eustonian project from the beginning.
[1] I note that the Henry “Scoop” Jackson Society, founded around the same time with similar aims and substantially overlapping membership, continues to go from strength to strength. I put this down to its continuing willingness to actually deal with the world and have concrete policies, even though I personally find these policies for the most part ridiculous.
[2] Of course, the Eustonauts were very nearly as much sinned against as sinning on this ground, as they tended to pick battle with far-left groups for whom this sort of debating tactic was also second nature, and both groups had highly unsavoury temporary political allies who they thought they could control or influence, but who ended up being an embarrassment to them. But the real vehemence of the Euston group was always aimed at “liberals”, “Guardianistas” and other people who demonstrably were not guilty of the crimes of association and fellow-travelling which they were accused of, and who didn’t generally behave like a branch of Militant who had just lost a closely-contested rugby match. For people like Nick Cohen, the hatred of “liberals” has been the one constant in a political life otherwise characterised by change, which is surprising, as on nearly every important political issue of the last twenty years, when they have disagreed it has been liberals who were right.
[3] Islam as practiced in the world; there are of course plenty of modernised forms of Islam compatible with all sorts of views about human rights, but frankly I don’t deal in that sort of pussy-footing with respect to Christianity so I’m not going to insert any more boilerplate disclaimers in this piece. I am not writing a manifesto here, after all.
[4] Jamie Kenny of Blood & Treasure was the first to notice how perfectly this phrase of Cohen’s sums up the Decent/Eustonian Weltanschaung.
[5] And learn the same lessons the hard way; one can’t help but notice that Michael Ledeen’s doctrine that “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall” is taking on rather a new meaning these days; just as every kid has to touch a hot stove and everyone with a computer has to lose their files before they learn to back up, every generation of policymakers appears to have to learn by doing, at someone else’s expense, the limits of offensive war as a tool of foreign policy.
{ 46 comments }
David Slakter 04.14.08 at 10:10 pm
Although military solutions might sometimes reduce avoidable suffering, that isn’t their usual result. Humanitarian interventionists who aren’t circumspect about this aren’t all that humanitarian.
lemuel pitkin 04.14.08 at 10:11 pm
people who had been wrong for decades during the Cold War
Sorry, what’s this about?
I don’t know much about “Decents” but there don’t seem to be many (any?) actual ex-Stalinists among them? Which side are you supposing the Trots to have been on, and why was it wrong?
As for Berman, he was on the US side during the Cold War — he made his bones apologizing for the contras. Which certainly was the wrong side, as far as I’m concerned, but I don’t think it’s what you have in mind here — and he’s cerainly not making up for it by doing the exact thing wrt Iraq.
lemuel pitkin 04.14.08 at 10:17 pm
… on the other hand, footnote 5 is brilliant.
dsquared 04.14.08 at 10:21 pm
I am using “Trots” in the traditional British Labour Party sense of “anyone to the left of me, the differences between which I do not propose to bother to get right”. Sorry. Berman was of course a classic Cold War liberal, but his British John the Baptists were in general late converts from one form or another of Marxism and while they weren’t in general Stalinists, I think it’s fair to say that they weren’t expecting things to end up in anything remotely resembling the way they actually did in 1989, and that in this sense, they’d backed the wrong horse.
Grammar nazi 04.14.08 at 10:38 pm
“It’s also possible to go on and note that in acting on Berman’s inspiration…”
“go on and note”…
I would go on and note that is unfortunate, but I have tried and do so before to no effect.
I’m sure Daniel will try and do better in the future, and I will try and be hopeful that this is just a phase, but, if not, I will try and be philosophical about it, because I really like his stuff and try and be optimistic.
Try and improve.
roger 04.14.08 at 10:44 pm
Actually, I thought Berman’s unique contribution was to show how not to do intellectual history. For instance, if your history of the contemporary Islamicist movement entirely skips the Cold war and makes a bee line from Hitler to Osama bin Laden, you are a suck historian. If you simply erase from your history the struggle between various forms of nationalism and Islamic movements, and preserve a lot of silence around the fact that actual Nazi collaborators, like those around the Shah’s father in Iran, were taken out of prison and put in positions of power after the coup overthrowing democratic government in Iran in 1953, then I suppose you (a) don’t know Jack or (b) hope your audience doesn’t know jack. It is the kind of mistake that would not be looked upon with favor by any academic specializing in the field, but that goes over like sex and barbecue with McCain (or does the barbecue come before the sex?) with the half educated media elite.
If you act so as to spread ignorance in the world – to the point where you can point to the happy result that the Islamicists in Iraq, aka the Da’wa party, are being defended by the Americans with not one American in 100 knowing anything about the Da’wa party’s history – well then, you are intellectually immoral. And intellectual immorality is Berman’s problem. He has only one expertise to offer – he is a moralist, supposedly more sensitive to wrong than your average person. And that expertise is (besides being laughable) deeply and hopelessly corrupt.
Grammar nazi 04.14.08 at 10:50 pm
While I’m at it, I’m shocked by the number of times I’ve seen “This is the worse …” Do these people not understand bad, worse, worst?
Sorry for the derail, but WTF?
Grammar nazi 04.14.08 at 11:24 pm
Trying to make sure that I was not being a fatuous jerk, I found this:
From “AUE: FAQ excerpt: “try and”, “be sure and”, “go” + verb”:
Most handbooks disapprove of these expressions in formal
style; even the permissive WDEU admits of “try and” that “most of the examples are not from highly formal styles”. Fowler wrote, “It is an idiom that should not be discountenanced, but used when it comes natural”
So, I guess if it comes natural…
Geoff Robinson 04.14.08 at 11:56 pm
it all reminded me of late Stalin era intellectual Communism. Some intelligent people, Dobb, Meek etc. who were totally politically inept and afflicted with a desire to show themselves to be ‘tough’ that resulted in them deferring to thugs. Late Stalin Communism appealed constantly to universal human values and the defenses of the enlightenment agaisnt the fascist Americans. Didn’t Benda end up a fellow traveler?
Grammar nazi 04.15.08 at 12:23 am
Hey there, you moderaters. It sure seems that the way things work is that “moderated” comments are doomed to inattention. Comments since mine have turned up. Mine probably won’t turn un until the morning. By then, they’ll be comments on tired posts from yesterday. Is this a problem?
Randy Paul 04.15.08 at 1:27 am
The Euston Manifesto brought to mind the old saying about urinating in a blue serge suit: it leaves you with a warm feeling, but no one notices.
They lost me when they expressed outrage at Amnesty International, calling their criticism of the Bush administration as “grotesque,” while referring to rendition and torture as “a departure from universal principles.”
ploeg 04.15.08 at 1:38 am
One can add that, whereas we in the US and the UK had less-than-friendly relations with the leading countries of Communism, fascism/Nazism, and Communism (again), the leading countries of Islam generally are our clients. As such, we can deal with the sexism, racism, etc. of Islam-as-it-is on a rather different level than we have dealt with the issues of the other ideologies. Makes things a bit easier to sort out when you don’t necessarily have a geopolitical template smashed on top of all of your other differences.
christian h. 04.15.08 at 1:41 am
Daniel, what are you talking about? British Trots (actual ones, I mean) were strongly opposed to Stalinism, and expected it to lead to a return to capitalism. Certainly more prescient than most. IS/SWP, at least, didn’t back either side in the cold war; I’d say this was the only way to avoid backing the “wrong side”.
lemuel pitkin 04.15.08 at 4:26 am
Grammar N*zi, you really need to pick a new moniker. Getting spam-filtered must be annoying to you and, more importantly, screws up the comment numbering when someone gets around to approving your comments. May I suggest “grammar pedant” instead, or would that be redundant?
dsquared 04.15.08 at 6:15 am
10: yes, it is a known problem (I regularly find that my own comments get selected for moderation). Sorry and all that but we didn’t really miss anything time-critical, did we?
dsquared 04.15.08 at 6:18 am
13: I am sure you’re right about IS/SWP, but tragically nobody cares, any more than they care about the differences between neoconservatives and the Euston Manifesti. If you were a communist of any sort (particularly any sort named after a Russian) between the end of the war and 1989, you backed the losing greyhound mate; it is not like Trotskyism has been slowly and steadily building a growing base of support while Stalinism has been in decline. I would even say that European Maoists had backed a losing proposition, despite the fact that China looks in perfectly good health.
Paul C 04.15.08 at 7:00 am
Grammar Nazi: perhaps, pace Goldberg, you could call yourself “Grammar Liberal” instead?
bad Jim 04.15.08 at 7:56 am
A public service citation (since I’d never heard of it and had to look it up):
abb1 04.15.08 at 8:10 am
There is certainly something out there resembling Nazism during the 1930s. And that’s the vastly superior muscular Kultur of the Decents and Neocons.
ejh 04.15.08 at 9:46 am
There’s a short discussion (what I wrote) of the poitical origin of the Decents reproduced here for anybody interested.
chris y 04.15.08 at 9:46 am
Daniel, what are you talking about? British Trots (actual ones, I mean) were strongly opposed to Stalinism, and expected it to lead to a return to capitalism.
Except that in 1989 most of them turned out to have been lesser-evilists wrt the USSR and its satellites after all. This came as a severe disappointment to those who were serious about the above. (A list of semi-well-known Trots who didn’t turn out to be lesser-evilists does not constitute an argument against this assertion.)
ejh 04.15.08 at 9:59 am
Except that in 1989 most of them turned out to have been lesser-evilists wrt the USSR and its satellites after all.
Well yes, except that the particular Trotskyists to whom the Decents are most hostile were ones who didn’t turn out to be like this.
But I certainly wouldn’t walk away from my assessment of the central motivation – a desire on the part of people who had been wrong for decades during the Cold War to be on the right side of history for once.
I have one big disagreement with this (well, two actually) which is that it tends to neglect the fact that a substanital proportion of actually existing Decents were always Labour Right people, pro-NATO, Atlanticists. Perhaps this may be less evident at the intellectual level but that’s probably because Healeyites tend to theorise less than Trotskyites do, but if you read the blogs (for as long as you can stand it, which may not be very long) it’s plain enough. There’s a lot of this stuff which comes not just out of the Cold War but out of the Labour Party Wars of the Eighties.
Jasper Milvain 04.15.08 at 10:48 am
Grammar Nazi, “try and” is used by Orwell and Dickens – and probably by lots of other canonical writers, but I was reading Sketches by Boz and some Orwell essays the last time I heard someone rant about this, and the construction came up in both within a couple of pages. The OED has examples back to 1686 – yes, it marks it colloq, but I’m at a loss to see what it was about our host’s prose style that made you think he was aiming at formality. And “go on and” needn’t be a colloquial version of “go on to” at all; it could be a perfectly formal construction along the lines of “go further and” or “move on and”.
Martin Wisse 04.15.08 at 12:11 pm
I’m not prepared to accept the counsel of despair that it’s intrinsically impossible to ever use Western military power to reduce the amount of avoidable suffering in the world. There have been, albeit rare and limited, success stories and it ought to be possible to learn from and build on those successes.
It would be interesting to see what you think are these success stories, because I was asking myself the same question the other day and I couldn’t think of any.
dsquared 04.15.08 at 12:56 pm
Sierra Leone does look like it helped a lot. The French squadron in Ndjamena have calmed down a lot of nasty tricks that Bashir might have played on Chad, although the long term consequences of propping up Idriss Deby might not be so grand. Kosovo was nobody’s idea of an unqualified success but not a total disaster either and could provide some lessons. The liberation of Kabul has been a huge success, albeit that I am not sure if it could be isolated from the wider occupation of Afghanistan, which appears to be going to crap. That’s about it really.
chris y 04.15.08 at 1:07 pm
With respect to dsquared, and without even disputing his examples, that seems to me to suggest the same sort of success rate as if the impact of these interventions was completely random (which wouldn’t surprise me much).
abb1 04.15.08 at 1:13 pm
…and could provide some lessons
Yeah, how ’bout those freedom-loving KLA folks allegedly chopping some hundreds of Serbs into pieces and selling their organs on the black market? Maybe Kieran could write a post about it.
ejh 04.15.08 at 1:17 pm
That’s one atrocity story I have great difficulty believing.
abb1 04.15.08 at 1:41 pm
Why, according to CNN:
ejh 04.15.08 at 1:50 pm
Yeah, I saw that. But it’s the sort of excessively-lurid story that I treat with great scepticism.
Paul C 04.15.08 at 2:48 pm
The organ-harvesting story is best viewed as pantomime.
engels 04.15.08 at 3:16 pm
I’d say that the defining characteristics of the Decents were:
1) a boundless confidence in the clarity of their moral intuitions, and a belief that any differences of opinion on matters of policy stemmed directly from the stunted moral faculties of others
2) a bottomless loathing for almost everybody else on the Left, but especially anti-imperialists and SWPers
Flying Rodent 04.15.08 at 4:27 pm
Well, my objections to the Eustonauts are legion, and they’ve been fully documented elsewhere. I will say that I’ve been aware of Aaronovitch and Cohen since their Graun/Observer gigs, plus Geras and Harry’s Place as a kind of annoying, high-pitched whining sound in the background noise of the internet.
Still, I never really considered them worth having a proper go at until the Lebanon war, when all that chat about Orwellian linguistic accuracy and moral equivalence went out of the window, and we all had to understand the disaster we were watching in context.
Now, those of us used to being told off for attempting to understand the evil Islamofascisticals might have found that odd enough, before we even got to the nasty hints about Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross. I think it was the excerpt from Nick Cohen’s opus, lecturing the Iraq War protesters for supporting fascists that really made me sit up and take notice, though.
A pretty unpleasant bunch, all round, and a pretty clear example of what can happen when you take your own propaganda too seriously.
I think Daniel’s a bit optimistic here, sadly – I seriously doubt we’ve heard the last of this lot. They’ll be back soon enough waving another loyalty oath for us all to sign.
christian h. 04.15.08 at 4:36 pm
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to think that the situation in Kosovo would be worse than it is had NATO not attacked, and made it clear to the KLA that they wouldn’t. (As for the atrocity story, it’s no more convincing than most of what we’ve been told about Serbian atrocities. The difference is that the latter stories have been canonized.)
Regarding Chad, that’s an absurd example. Debry is no better than Bashir; and French bases in Chad have to be viewed as part and parcel of French imperialism in Africa, the same imperialism that at the very least enabled the genocide in Ruanda. (And then intervened – from those very same bases – to protect the genocidaires, probably helping to set of the war in Congo.)
The only example where I might agree on a more-or-less positive outcome is Sierra Leone, although again this has to be qualified by remarking that the problems in this country were vastly increased by western presence (in the form of mercenaries, mostly) in the first place.
On a more general level, it is the idea of “humanitarian intervention” itself that is the problem, even if a particular instance of intervention should actually be humanitarian and “work”.
This idea is useful as a tool to convince the gullible that we need vast armies, able to attack anywhere on short notice, dispersed on bases all over the world. For this reason, supporting humanitarian intervention even in the most clear-cut cases does more harm than good – the ruling class won’t spend trillions to keep an army simply to help people. They keep it to further their imperial designs.
dsquared 04.15.08 at 4:40 pm
I don’t recall the Eustonauts (Harry’s Place in particular) ever making dark hints that the Red Cross had conspired with the global anti-Semitic media leftwingers to fake an atrocity in order to carry out a blood libel against Israel – they just came right out and said it.
And although I agree that it’s unlikely that this bunch will disappear into the sunset, my read on the current state of Eustonaut thinking is that they have at least more or less given up on the belief that they had any realistic prospect of being the vanguard of a popular movement.
dsquared 04.15.08 at 4:44 pm
I don’t agree with you on the details, Christian but I think I do on the broad historical sweep. I can’t agree that Déby is as bad as Bashir; he’s arguably more corrupt from a financial point of view, but Bashir has been responsible for many more deaths and atrocities. And I don’t think there’s a particularly helpful analogy between Chad and Rwanda.
On the other hand, I do agree on the general issue that the armies of powerful states are a bad tool for the job – I keep saying on my blog and every other one I’m not banned from that it’s wrong to think of the French intervention in Rwanda as an example of a “bad” intervention. Operation Turquoise was poorly thought through, motivated more by politics than humanitarianism, badly executed and disastrous in its results. In other words, it was an absolutely typical humanitarian intervention, not a strange and unusual case.
christian h. 04.15.08 at 4:54 pm
Yeah, I think we mostly agree. I wasn’t trying to draw a parallel between Chad and Ruanda; rather, I was pointing out that you can’t get the French presence in Chad without the meddling in Ruanda. (This is part of my general point.)
We’ll have to disagree on Bashir and Debry. Clearly, more people have been killed on Bashir’s watch, but then Sudan isn’t Chad. Anyway, supporting Debry simply because Bashir supports his enemies is typical imperial divide-and-rule.
Flying Rodent 04.15.08 at 4:55 pm
…they just came right out and said it.
Really? I’m sure I remember they used their usual arms-length tactics, i.e. report the wingnut propaganda in fretfully concerned tones, then sit back and let the commenters’ crazed imaginations run riot before stepping in to say, Well, perhaps it’s a bit much to call the Red Cross Jew-hating fascists, but it’s certainly a bit suspicious.
It’s an effective way of getting the message out without getting your hands too dirty, I suppose, but I still don’t understand why they bother with the impassioned Debate does get rather heated and there are some nutters, who we tell off fiercely (once in a blue moon) act.
It’s fooling no-one.
christian h. 04.15.08 at 4:57 pm
Yuck, I repeatedly misspelled Pres. Deby’s name. Not very convincing…
lemuel pitkin 04.15.08 at 5:36 pm
On a more general level, it is the idea of “humanitarian intervention†itself that is the problem, even if a particular instance of intervention should actually be humanitarian and “workâ€.
Right. We don’t need the US (and France, the UK, etc., but really we’re talking about the US) to use its arbitrary power more wisely. We need to repalce arbitrary authority with a consistent, legitimate set of rules. So framing the question in terms of the merits of this or that particular intervention is getting off in the wrong direction from the start.
mpowell 04.15.08 at 7:49 pm
Right. We don’t need the US (and France, the UK, etc., but really we’re talking about the US) to use its arbitrary power more wisely. We need to repalce arbitrary authority with a consistent, legitimate set of rules.
I think there could be some confusion over what is being claimed here. You seem to be asserting that humanitarian intervention is incompatible with a consistent legitimate set of rules. But I think dsquared and others might argue that humanitarian intervention organized by international institutions might be helpful if those institutions are constructed properly. Would that be something other than a ‘humanitarian intervention’ or do you just disagree with the sentiment that:
I’m not prepared to accept the counsel of despair that it’s intrinsically impossible to ever use Western military power to reduce the amount of avoidable suffering in the world.
regardless of how it’s usage is circumscribed and governed by international rules and institutions?
lemuel pitkin 04.15.08 at 8:07 pm
I’m saying that before we ask whether someone (the United States, Bernie Goetz, your local Committee of Vigilance) might be able to use force or the threat of it to reduce suffering, we have to ask whether that someone can legitimately use force at all.
The fact that arbitrary exercise of US power might improve people’s lives in some particualr situation is irrelevant, because we (we being the genral public, and not US policymakers) don’t get to decide on a case by case basis whether the US will intervene, but only whether, in general, that is an authority we are going to grant to the US government to use as it sees fit. You don’t get Sierra Leone without Iraq, in other words.
<I’m not prepared to accept the counsel of despair that it’s intrinsically impossible to ever use Western military power to reduce the amount of avoidable suffering in the world.
Maybe, maybe not, but irrelevant. The question is not whether some particular intervention might reduce suffering, but whether a world in which the US government has the right to use military force whenever it claims doing so will reduce suffering, is preferable to one in which the US government does not have that right.
lemuel pitkin 04.15.08 at 8:09 pm
Oops, my third paragraph was supposed to be preceded by this: I’m not prepared to accept the counsel of despair that it’s intrinsically impossible to ever use Western military power to reduce the amount of avoidable suffering in the world.
christian h. 04.15.08 at 10:50 pm
I agree with lemuel. As for mpowell’s point
I think dsquared and others might argue that humanitarian intervention organized by international institutions might be helpful if those institutions are constructed properly[]
I would contend that the very state of the world making the construction of such institutions possible would also make them unnecessary.
roger 04.16.08 at 1:13 am
As long as we are talking about interventions, we should, I imagine, be talking about how to intervene on a situation in the U.S. that apparently can’t be taken care of domestically – I’m talking, of course, of the president and the vice president planning and implementing protocols for torture. I’m sure the president of Zimbabwe has done the same thing, but we don’t exactly have the notes for it – but we do in the case of the U.S.
Now, no power in the U.S. seems willing or able to curb and punish the alleged criminals. Unfortunately, it is likely that the EU countries, for economic reasons, are too scared to act – you know how corrupt they’ve gotten over there. It’s practically Eurabia. So surely we need some third world force. Maybe the president of Iran and of Venezuela can whip up something that all of us who believe in humanitarian interventions can get behind. Maybe the Euston-ites can start a petition. That will make them tremble in the seats of power!
Randy Paul 04.16.08 at 1:43 am
Maybe the Euston-ites can start a petition. That will make them tremble in the seats of power!
Don’t count on it. Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition are just “deviations from universal principles” to them.
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