Thursday, July 06, 2006
Moral Contradictions
More news about how the government bends news services to its will.
San. James Inhofe’s defender Marc Morano doesn’t even find it newsworthy that “many congressional committees are highly partisan and political,” responding to criticism that Inhofe’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee launched a partisan attack on Al Gore’s global warming reports. Morano just explicity admits that using taxpayer dollars to launch partisan attacks through a congressional committee is standard fare, so it’s OK when Inhofe does it.
Andrew Sullivan recently (amazingly enough) both criticized Cheney’s statements about WMDs in the lead up to the War in Iraq and somehow equated that to Gore’s global warming statements. Thinkprogress helpfully points out that Cheney falsified, cherry-picked, and exaggerated the data while Gore’s work is the consensus of the scientific community fairly represented. Paul Pillar’s confession is also cited at Thinkprogress.
Many critics are pointing out the obvious disparity in US policy regarding Iran and North Korea, two dangerous nations the president has suddenly decided must be addressed through patient diplomacy. A lot of right-wing commentators are also suddenly in love with the idea of diplomacy, praising the administration for its “patience.” My, my, how the worm has turned, eh?
Conservatives have always had the luxury of tailoring their policy guidelines to their abilities, disregarding internal consistency, morality, or coherency. In Ford’s era, thus, they could support the bloody military dictatorships of Chile and Nicaragua while excoriating Cuba’s lesser human rights abuses. Reagan found that gentle reminders were all the military dictatorships in Guatemala, Argentina, and El Salvador needed, while the leftist government of Nicaragua was a target of the US war machine, with the CIA funneling hundred of millions of dollars through the eighties against a government whose worst excesses were a joke compared to the slaughter of Guatemala’s military dictatorship (about 100,000 executed civilians in the eighties) or El Salavador’s military excesses (more than half that of Guatemala). Conservatives blamed the left-wing rebels, though no serious international observer shared that view. In El Salvador, for example, the UN later found that only 5% of the civilian fatalities were attributable the rebels, the rest being the responsibility of the government forces and the death squads that were allied with them, the executioners that Reagan funded massively.
Reagan’s Administration, State Department, and other agencies lied constantly about the human rights violations (or mass slaughter, as it were) of their proxies in the Central America, using their own bent analysis to bully a pliable Congress into appropriating funds for the military dictatorships they championed. When that failed, Reagan simply ignored the Boland Amendment and funneled money to the Contras anyway. Or his administration construed “humanitarian aid” to mean anything aside from guns and bullets, including vehicles, that belligerent forces needed. Ford exhibited a similar disdain for Congressional funding limits: when Ted Kennedy passed a bill limiting aid to the bloody Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (near the apex of its violence, no less) Ford simply ignored the law.
Gentler forms of hypocrisy were present in other conservative administrations. Bush I sent troops to depose Manuel Noriega, a hypocrisy I have covered before, alleging that he was invading a nation and deposing its leader because he was a drug trafficker, an excuse for invasion that is truly novel in the annals of history. Several sovereign nations were invaded in Bush I’s term, but only oil-rich Kuwait merited a military defense, of course.
This is not to let Bill Clinton off the hook for his policies regarding Haiti or Turkey, but no democrat since the days of Lyndon Johnson has evinced such an utter disregard for moral consistency in foreign policy as most conservative presidents since then, and no comparison has ever existed between the exhortations of the right-wing establishment versus those of the left-wing establishment. Compare the militarism and principle-free foreign policy recommendations of the National Review to that of Mother Jones and tell me which side in this political argument fuels bloody foreign policy more.
This president, as I have written before, is not a conservative aberration in anything other than his lack of use of the veto. Ford (and two of his employees, Rumsfeld and Cheney) kicked and screamed when Congress passed FISA and laws enacting congressional oversight of covert action. He vetoed those laws but his veto was overridden by a massive majority in Congress.
The ugliest part of the GOP has never acknowledged that those laws exist, that Congress and the American people have a right to exercise moral restraint and oversight on the foreign policy actions of the president. Ford simply ignored those laws, sending more funds to Chile than Congress allowed as Kissinger perjured himself repeatedly regarding former US actions in Chile and current abuses of the military government that they helped install. Kissinger and Ford greenlighted Suharto’s massacre in East Timor in 1975 and promised to provide political cover for his excesses, an action that subsequent observers and even US leaders have labeled “genocide.”
Carter provided a moral respite from a rampant foreign policy, but he was excoriated by the right for his “weakness.” Reagan picked up where Ford left off and certainly surpassed him in his excesses. Reagan, as Ford did before him, covertly and overtly bent and broke the law to fund the most violent military despotisms. When caught, his officials (Elliott Abrams, Oliver North) and their cheerleaders on the right were very explicit in their contempt for the concept of congressional oversight or moral behavior in foreign policy. Oliver North was proud of what he did. Abrams literally sneered at the congressional committee investigating him, calling them “pious clowns,” among other things.
Bush I and Clinton, while more moderate, had very low standards for their “friends.” Bush II, however, has reasserted what Reagan’s people always did: Congress has no right to supervise covert action and the President is not bound by any law when, in his judgment, the law is too restrictive. Forget about FISA, forget about half a dozen anti-torture laws and treaties the US has enacted, forget about habeas corpus for people like Hamdi and Padilla, and anyone else the administration designates an “enemy combatant,” forget about the Geneva Conventions. The President has violated these laws covertly, usually without informing Congress, and when caught has excoriated the whistle blowers and maintained that these extraordinary powers are necessary to prosecute an undeclared and potentially decades-long “War on Terror,” or, as some in the administration now aptly call it, “Long War.”
Every conservative in government and the media has whole-heartedly approved of this extraordinary lawlessness, as they did in Reagan’s day. They have even exceeded the zealousness of Dick Cheney, advocating imprisoning journalists who publish news of illegal government programs. Bush’s ugliest flaws are those that are most vociferously supported by his brutal base.
This is not a philosophy of government in any sense. These aren’t people who would support any president with a militaristic foreign policy. When Clinton bombed Kosovo conservatives, virtually to a man and woman, lined up and lambasted him for his reckless foreign policy. When he sent two lone divisions to Somalia to protect food shipments to starving people they wailed when a couple of dozen troops perished.
This movement has no universal moral guidelines. They will acquire and discard reasons and justifications for actions as easily as an actor changing costumes between the acts of a play. The leadership of the Republican Party has no political philosophy beyond acquiring power and enriching themselves and their associates thereby, as well as reinforcing existing systems of government and economy that they have mastered and discrediting and destroying those they haven’t. Most conservative leaders and propagandists do not necessarily believe in small government or big government, an aggressive or restrained foreign policy, or anything else beyond balanced budgets and GOP control of government.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 6:02 PM 
