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As I speculated over a week ago, it was Condoleeza Rice who pulled the lever that opened the trap door for Saddam Hussein. According to an account in the Sunday New York Times, both American Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and U.S. commander Gen. George W. Casey Jr. were in this country on leave (another indication that the Iraqis knew just what they were up to when they rushed the execution). Both argued for a delay, as did Americans in Iraq, especially because of the upcoming religious holiday. Their objections were eloquently stated by an anonymous American official,
We said, “You have to do it by international law, you have to do it in accordance with international standards of decorum, you have to establish yourselves as a nation under law.”
But Rice overruled both Khalilzad and Casey, who were immediately kicked upstairs after the hanging–Casey to the Joint Chiefs and Khalilzad to the United Nations–clear warnings to other American officials who dare to publicly air their disagreements with Rice. As usual, Rice herself left it to an underling to do the explaining:
“It literally came down to the Iraqis interpreting their law, and our looking at their law and interpreting it differently,” the official said. “Finally, it was decided we are not the court of last appeal for Iraqi law here. The president of their country says it meets their procedures. We are not going to be their legal nannies.”
Remember that quote people of America, because it signals that this administration has lost whatever moral center it had. Whatever one thinks of George W. Bush or the War in Iraq, in the beginning both were justified in moral terms. We were going to rid the world of an evil dictator who supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction, but who had, without doubt, murdered and gassed thousands of Iraqi citizens.
Does anyone remember the vaunted “Bush Doctrine” ? Released during a speech at West Point in 2002 it begins:
The United States possesses unprecedented� and unequaled�strength and influence in the world. Sustained by faith in the principles of liberty, and the value of a free society, this position comes with unparalleled responsibilities, obligations, and opportunity. The great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of power that favors freedom.
The essence of the doctrine was that this country would conduct its foreign affairs on the basis of a clear set of values. It stated, “Our goals on the path to progress are clear: political and economic freedom, peaceful relations with other states, and respect for human dignity.”
Please compare that last phrase with the quote from Ms. Rice’s mouthpiece. “Respect for human dignity” has now become “We are not going to be their legal nannies,” that final word implying a thinly-veiled cultural superiority. Every American should think long and hard about the implications of that phrase. For example, try it on for size with some past iniquities. What about Auschwitz? What about Pol Pot? What about “the disappeared”� and finally what about Darfur?
In front of the entire world, the United States–the nation of the Fourteen Points, the Four Freedoms, the Marshall Plan and the Peace Corps (all, by the way, initiatives by Democratic presidents)–has essentially said that when it comes to morality whatever our so-called allies decide to do is fine with us.
For two decades now the Republicans have delighted in attacking the Democrats and Liberals in particular for what they term “cultural relativism.” Much of this has come from the Religious Right, whose fundamentalist beliefs assert the primacy of a rigid set of moral thou-shalt-nots. For Liberals the meaning of relativism–which, by the way, is a term no Liberal I know has ever used in moral terms– has always been that we need to understand the beliefs and customs of other cultures, but no Liberal American has EVER advocated that we condone immoral actions.
Now our very own Secretary of State has issued a statement of MORAL RELATIVISM that may well go down as one of the most offensive, iniquitous remarks ever made by an American public official. What do Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and company have to say about this? Or is it OK when it involves “nonbelievers,” as a certain Ayatollah once stated?
Have we sunk this low? God help us if this is how we now make decisions. Perhaps we need to recall the final summation of Robert Jackson at the Nuremburg Trials:
Of one thing we may be sure. The future will never have to ask, with misgiving, what could the Nazis have said in their favor. History will know that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say. They have been given the kind of a Trial which they, in the days of their pomp and power, never gave to any man. But fairness is not weakness. The extraordinary fairness of these hearings is an attribute of our strength.
The contrast between Jackson’s words and those of Rice’s underling testify to how low we have fallen.
POSTSCRIPT: Let me add one more New Year’s prediction. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki will be dead by the end of the year. The price on his head by the Sunnis must be amazing. In addition he now is another albatross around the neck of an already albatross-laden Moktada al-Sadr. Ironically, whether he makes it through the year will be up to the very Americans he thumbed his nose at. It may take all 20,000 troops proposed by Bush and Rice just to keep him alive.
Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord,
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