An Op Ed From a Critic of America’s Human Rights Policy

A reader, Nalliah Thayabharan, posted a very well stated comment, which I published, noting that America’s professed concern for human rights is belied by the behavior of some of its allies, such as Saudi Arabia, Thailand and, formerly, Egypt. He maintains that the stated concern of the US for human rights is selective indignation, and a hammer to be used in its aims of maintaining its status as a superpower.  He mentions Iran and Sri Lanka as nations unfairly (he believes) singled out by the US for selective indignation. Sri Lanka has had serious problems with its Tamil minority, and engaged in actions to suppress a revolt among them that cross the border into human rights violations. Iran has a similarly checkered record in the area of human rights. It also has aspirations to be an Islamic superpower.Selective indignation is a game with many players.

The former Soviet Union used to complain eloquently about racism in America, despite tension in the former USSR between Slavic and non Slavic Soviet citizens. Iran oppresses its Arab minority, even as it speaks up for Arabs in Israel. The solution is not to stop supporting human rights, or to stop being a superpower, but to strive to be a better superpower.The world political landscape has always featured superpowers functioning as a hub for smaller nations. Abdicating as a superpower will simply bring a new nation into the political vacuum thus created. At the end of World War Two and in Iraq after the overthrow of Sadaam Hussein, America had to engage in harsh reprisal against insurgents to maintain the new regime it had brought into power. In war and in times of great instability, it is sometimes necessary to undertake harsh measures.Despite his apparent bias twoards America’s enemies and adversaries on the world stage, Nalliah Thayabharan makes valid points. Without agreeing with his comment, I am presenting it in its entirety below

We already know that the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar,Yemen and Bahrain are among the major human rights violators in the world; however, the US, Britain and EU cronies who frequently boast of their concerns about the preservation of human rights and freedom have been long indifferent to the persecution of political activists, incarceration of journalists and bloggers and other abuses of human rights in these countries. On the other hand, the superpowers have always employed the excuse of human rights for pressuring the independent and non-aligned nations such as Iran and Sri Lanka

The dualistic approach is a reflection of the conflict between US rhetoric and reality. As with all political leaders, their promises typically contradict their observed behavior. The US has one standard when it comes to human rights: it prefers countries that suppress their populations in the name of providing the US with cheap access to raw materials and resources and a favorable investment climate for US Corporations. US leaders will never openly admit this, but on some level – whether it’s conscious or subconscious is irrelevant – they understand that the US cannot succeed in controlling global resources without supporting some very unsavory characters, or by engaging in atrocities themselves. The Iraq war was a classic example of such brutality, with the US openly engaging in collective punishment in the name of “pacifying” communities such as Fallujah and Ramadi, so as to actively turn them against the insurgency. The notorious “Salvador Option” in which the US trained Iraqi death squads to target suspected sympathizers with the insurgency and engage in torture and murder of these individuals, was a powerful example of active US contempt for basic human rights. Predictably, the implications of these actions for human rights in Iraq were consistently ignored by US intellectuals, journalists, and political/business elites.

One can’t maintain an empire without engaging in some very unpleasant and nasty actions against the world’s poor and downtrodden. This was openly conceded by Bush near the end of his administration and as he celebrated the “surge” of US troops and US counter-insurgency violence and announced that a withdrawal from Iraq was unacceptable because of the US interest in retaining unimpeded control over Iraq’s oil resources.

Of course, rationalizations of state violence are always a part of the equation. Bush and other imperialists justified using violence to control Iraqi oil under the assumptions that privatization and “free markets” would inevitably create a rising tide that lifts all boats, and that the US could be better trusted than the “terrorists” to control this vital resource. We’ve seen the poverty of these claims, in reality, in light of the widespread understanding of Iraqis (revealed continuously in polls) that they saw the US, rather than foreign Islamists or insurgency members, as the primary threat to Iraqi and regional peace. We’ve also seen such rationalizations thoroughly debunked in the case of Egypt, which has witnessed living standards for the masses rapidly deteriorate under a neoliberal regime. Regardless of the justification, the larger point is that you don’t become the most powerful military and economic force in the world without repressing local populations. Most people, after all, tend to opposed to occupations, violent domination, and neoliberal cronyism/extortion, as exercised by the US and its preferred dictators. The only way to get them to go along is through violence and coercion.

I don’t think the US is “indifferent” to abuses in Saudi Arabia and other friendly states, but actively supportive of, and committed to those abuses. In the case of Saudi Arabia, it is granted carte blanche to engage in human rights violations and terrorism, so long as it continues to provide the US with cheap oil and sell oil only for US dollars. Its actions are repulsive. It’s been the consistent recipient of U.S. military, economic, and political aid despite its recent outlawing of protest, its violent attacks on peaceful protesters, and its longstanding attacks on human rights. Of course, U.S. leaders can plead ignorance to these transgressions, but such claims are complete absurdities. You can simply read in the Washington Post reports from on the ground in Saudi Arabia from those suffering under this medieval regime, in which Shi’ite protesters are subject to “increasing detentions, beatings, and surveillance” in the government’s war on dissent. Then of course there’s the long record of abuses chronicled by groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The Saudi dictatorship is notorious for its denigration of women, who are seen as third class citizens at best. Human Rights Watch reports that the government’s many practices include “arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment, and reliance on the death penalty” for those who engage in theft, homosexuality, witchcraft, prostitution, and other criminal activities, real or imagined. Saudi police are known for breaking into individuals’ homes without a warrant in relation to charges as dubious as suspected alcohol possession and engaging in non-Muslim religious worship.

Then there’s US support for Saudi Arabia’s active suppression of Shi’ite majorities throughout the Arabian Peninsula. The Wikileaks revelations were extremely valuable among other findings in that they showed that US diplomats were well aware of Saudi Arabia’s responsibility for bombing civilians in its counter-insurgency war in Yemen. The monarchy has also used violent intervention in Bahrain not to mention on Saudi soil in order to suppress Shi’ite revolts against repressive minority Sunni governments. As Wikileaks showed, US diplomats largely dismissed Saudi responsibility for killing civilians in Yemen under the claim that the regime was allegedly doubling its efforts to minimize collateral damage. Such rationalizations are largely disingenuous in light of the United State’s own responsibility for the deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands in Iraq due to US bombing and military operations in Iraq, all also pursued under the promise of minimizing “collateral damage”, and in light of Saudi Arabia’s escalation of human rights violations on its own soil. It’s been easy for the US to ignore the unpleasantness of US and allied policies. When confronted with the ugly consequences of their “bombing for democracy” campaign, George Bush’s response was simply to dismiss the figures suggesting US responsibility in mass killing as irrelevant and unfounded, despite the fact that those who engaged in these studies used widely recognized statistical methods ranging from collecting news reports on the dead to engaging in cluster survey sampling, as is typically done when estimating wartime casualties. He could count on a compliant media to promptly drop the issue, considering the complete refusal of Democrats and fellow Republicans to explore the issue.

In the end, humanitarian rhetoric is, realistically speaking, a weapon to be wielded by the powerful against their enemies, rather than a serious concern in its own right. Media scholars like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have performed a vital service by documenting this trend – whereby humanitarian rhetoric is used by politicians and journalists to condemn US enemies who engage in human rights violations. Conversely, US allies are consistently given a pass and embraced despite their many transgressions and regular terror. This politicization of human rights is at times manifested quite perversely, as seen when the Bush and Obama administrations’ loud public pronouncements of support for democracy and human rights, accompanied by their many efforts to court the Saudi king in public by holding hands, kissing, and bowing to him in a sign of mutual respect.