Bolton: "I shrunk the coalition!"

Thanks to one poster’s concerns about the UN’s new Human Rights Council, it seemed appropriate to address them here rather than in the comments section. This National Review article sums up the conservative case against the new Council as follows.

The successor [i.e. new UN Human Rights Council] is worthy of the original — just as bad, and utterly undeserving of respect from anyone concerned about human rights. It's time for those who feel such concern, led by the U.S., to work together outside the U.N. system.

One has to wonder where such support would come from. Except for the United States, Israel and two tiny island states, virtually every nation on earth voted to approve the new UN Human Rights Council. According to this report, “The creation of the new Council was also hailed by virtually all human rights organizations.”

The National Review article also objects to the fact that the Council “puts liberal democracies side by side with genocidal despotisms as though they were equally legitimate.”

While this certainly has been true in the past, the whole idea of restructuring and creating a totally new Council was to tackle this very problem. The new Council has certain procedures to discourage the election of nations with serious human rights abuse records. These include pre-election vetting of candidate Council members, limited terms and removal from the Council by a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly for member countries that commit abuses.

Since the idea behind the new Council is to bring such abuses to light and focus attention on the countries in which they occur, the likelihood of abuses being committed by Council members should be less than would be the case if there were no formal umbrella organization dedicated to monitoring human rights. In cases where Council members do commit abuses, it will be easier to put pressure on them from within the Council and to get them to live up to their human rights commitments or face sanctions or pressures from global opinion. Arguably, although it is a slow, step-by-step process, it is better than no process and its chances of success are undeniably greater than simply ignoring the problem.

In my view, the new Council offers a proactive, constructive approach to dealing with human rights abuses. The benefits of having a good human rights record should outweigh the cost of continuing such abuses. If the Council imposes sanctions and exposes offending nations to world opinion without resorting to force, it will be a positive step in the right direction. The approach is rational, designed to discourage offending nations to stop such practices, to impose sanctions where necessary and to encourage economic benefits for countries that comply with Council policy.

The NR article, however, only sees the stick, not the carrot. “Even a laughably weak eligibility criterion — that any country under U.N. sanction for human-rights violations be barred from membership — self-destructed during the negotiations.”

The article goes on to propose setting up a non-UN human rights body comprised solely of liberal democracies. One has to wonder why, when every liberal democracy in the world (except the USA) approved and voted for the new UN Human Rights Council. As many on the left argue today, there is something very unrealistic in conservative foreign policy – and this seems to be the perfect example.

Surprisingly, the article then rejects its own advice to abandon the international ship. “While it would be foolish to expect the council to do much good, we still have a stake in blocking it from taking actions and codifying new rights fundamentally opposed to our interests.”

Hmmmm.

The problem with this particular conservative analysis, it seems to me, is that it is premised on America taking unilateral action, as in the case of Iraq. Apart from the obvious lack of success of the current administration's unilateral approach to geo-politics, it seems that Mr. Bolton’s presence at the UN has also helped to shrink the U.S.’s coalition of the willing from 30-some nations in Iraq to three in the General Assembly -- Israel and two islands in the Pacific.

Three cheers for Mr. Bolton!

Considering its lack of international legitimacy for the invasion of Iraq, its own not inconsiderable list of human rights abuses, including Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Bagram, imprisonment without trial, ghost prisoners, kidnappings, renditions, not to mention the latest allegations of civilian massacres in Iraq and virtual lack of support even among liberal democracies – the Bush administration and its apologists appear to have little credibility or political capital left beyond America's border.

There's a message for America in all this. One wonders if and when it will finally sink in.



File_Under: Human_Rights_Council; Human Rights Abuses; Bolton; Neo-Conservatism; Bush

Don't Tell the Kids!

There are many obscenities in the world you might not want your kids to know about just yet. War, genocide, starvation, human rights abuse, torture, forced prostitution and child pornography, not to mention terrorism and suicide bombers.

But here is something that everybody should know about. Stop the world, we want to get off!

United Nations - A running gag at the United Nations is that whenever the United States takes a defiant stand against an overwhelming majority of the 191 member states, there are only three countries that predictably vote with Washington most of the time - whether it is right or dead wrong.

As expected, this incongruous voting pattern was repeated Wednesday when the three loyal US allies - Israel and the two tiny Pacific Island nations of Palau and the Marshall Islands - were the only member states to stand in unison with the United States when it rejected a resolution calling for the creation of a new Human Rights Council.

The vote in the General Assembly was 170 in favor and four against (United States, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau), with three abstentions (Venezuela, Iran and Belarus).

And here is something that everybody already seems to know about. How to Lose Friends and Encourage Extremists

One of my proudest moments as an American working in Egypt always came at about this time of year, when the US State Department issued its annual report on the state of human rights around the world. I remember sitting in front of a computer in a Cairo living room a year before 9/11 while a group of young journalists, human rights activists, and academics downloaded the report from the Internet, eager to see what the world's most trusted authority on the rule of law had to say about their country and their region.

Their reaction was what made me grateful for having been born in the USA. Because they were bright, well-informed, and fiercely pro-democracy, they quibbled about how the report phrased a particular human rights abuse or why this or that infraction hadn't been given more or less emphasis.

But there was not the slightest doubt among them that this report spoke truth or that, of all the world's countries, only the United States of America had the performance record to speak with authority and credibility on this subject.

When this year's Human Rights report appeared last week, I e-mailed it to six of these old friends and asked them for their reactions "off the record."

They had a lot to say, but it all came down to this consensus: The United States had forfeited its right to report on abuses committed by others by committing its own, failing to correct them, and then holding no one in authority accountable. They said they would have expected this behavior in their own countries, but not in mine.
The keywords in their e-mails to me included Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Bagram, imprisonment without trial, ghost prisoners, kidnappings, renditions, unilateralism, bribing journalists, and Bush & Company and their whole Iraq adventure.

One of them wrote, "What kind of democracy is George Bush trying to spread anyway?"

This is something that Bush skeptics should know about. 500,000 reasons why the U.S. won’t invade Iran

And yes, there are signs of evolution.

The report puts greater stress on an approach administration officials call "effective diplomacy" - with the aim of encouraging "transformational democracy" - than it did in 2002.

"The administration we have today is not the administration that came into office," says Jon Wolfsthal, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "It's no longer a [neoconservative] government, it's a realistic government."

The report's emphasis on Iran's nuclear ambitions reflects the administration's view of the new reality: that Iran sponsors terrorism, threatens Israel, is meddling in Iraq's nascent democracy, and represents a generally destabilizing force in the region. "We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," the report says, adding that diplomacy must succeed in order to avoid confrontation.

Bush appears to be extending an olive branch to countries that rejected the unilateralist approach of his first term. In addition, more than in the 2002 document, Bush speaks of global challenges beyond the military and security threats.

"Many of the problems we face - from the threat of pandemic disease, to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to terrorism, to human trafficking, to natural disasters - reach across borders," the introduction states. "Effective multinational efforts are essential to solve these problems."

By the way, where did all the Democrats go?

We have a President who likes to break things. He has broken the federal budget, running up $3 trillion in new debt. He has broken the Geneva Conventions, giving the green light to torture. He has repeatedly broken promises - and broken faith - with the American people. And now, worst of all, he has broken the law.

In brazen violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), he ordered the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless wiretaps of American citizens. And, despite getting caught red-handed, he refuses to stop.

Let's be clear: No American - and that must include the President - is above the law. And if we fail to hold Bush to account, then he will be confirmed in his conviction that he can pick and choose among the laws he wants to obey. This is profoundly dangerous to our democracy.

So it is time for Congress to stand up and say enough! That's why, this week, Senator Russ Feingold proposed a resolution to censure George W. Bush for breaking the FISA law. And that's why I fully support this resolution of censure.

And here's something you ought to explain to your kids. Brain dead or brain alive?

The law should be struck down because it imposes an unacceptable burden on women. But it should also serve as a warning that the threat to abortion rights has reached a new level.

South Dakota's abortion law is the most restrictive one adopted by any state since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. It does not contain exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape or from incest. Nor does it allow abortions that are necessary to preserve the health of the mother. The law is unlikely to go into force anytime soon. If it did, it would simply drive women - as in the pre-Roe days - to risk their lives to end their pregnancies with illegal back-alley abortions.

Gov. Mike Rounds, who signed the bill into law, said that the "true test of a civilization" was how it treated "the most vulnerable and helpless," including "unborn children." But his state has hardly been a leader in protecting vulnerable children who have left the womb. The nation's three worst counties for child poverty at the time of the last census were all in South Dakota, according to the Children's Defense Fund. Buffalo County, home to the Crow Creek Indian Reservation, was dead last.

The legal definition of human death is “brain dead” – i.e. when the encephalogram registers a flat signal. Until at least four months into the pregnancy, zygotes and fetuses do not have central nervous systems or brains. The Chiavo case shows just how far anti-scientific notions have pervaded some conservative lawmakers. The South Dakota abortion law confirms this anti-science stance.

Pixelated, No Less

US BROADCASTERS have been hit by record-breaking fines of almost $4 million (£2.5 million) by a federal TV standards watchdog which decrees that even casual use of the “s-word” or pixelated shots of a woman’s breasts “disturb the peace and quiet of the home”.

There are many obscenities in the world you might not want your kids to know about, but natural sex and profanity on TV or in movies is not one of them.

The Island of Blood Is.

You can tell your kids about man’s inhumanity to man. You can teach them the mechanics of reproduction and safe sex. You might even be able to persuade them that swearing is a sign of an impoverished vocabulary.

But, whatever you do, don’t tell them what humans do to baby seals.



"Tags: Kids, Human_Rights, Iran, Censure, Abortion, Sex, Baby_Seals