"There ain't no way to find out why a snorer can't hear himself snore."
Mark Twain

I see by the papers, that Congress is again going to tie human rights issues to our aid program in China. Seems the Senate is displeased with their continued jailing of student protesters and the "most favored nation" trading status is up for grabs once more. Confrontation between nations who claim a need for a more understanding relationship. It's hard to argue with the Senate position, but not impossible. Hard to argue against human rights issues anywhere, whether they be in Russia, Iraq or China. But I wonder what purpose is served by tying aid to our supposed standards of equality under law. Supposed standards?

Not too strong a term, I would think. Here we are, setting ourselves up as a worldwide example of freedom and yet our own history is as bloody and repressive as any in the modern world. The roots of this country, from which we made our way to a modern standard of democracy and the rule of law, were nourished in their infancy on blood and slavery. Early into this very century, we were still killing off and rounding up our native population. We have the highest murder rate of any industrialized nation, as well as the highest per-capita rate of incarceration. Even now, two thirds of drug use arrests are among whites and eighty percent of those sent to prison for drug use are black. The terms that black's serve are uniformly longer. It's not an entirely perfect picture of human rights.

Even so, don't we have a moral commitment to hook human rights to financial aid or trade agreements? How else to make a stand for the freedoms we hold so dear?

Obviously, there's no doubt it's a good thing to encourage democratic principles wherever they can be encouraged. One can hardly quarrel with that, but I think moral high ground is always hard to hold, particularly when our own fingers are a little sticky.

Suppose, as an example, the German government said they were going to restrict investment in our foreign debt and cut the export of Mercedes and BMWs and Porsches, until we brought drug convictions in this country into social equity. Can you imagine the hell that would be raised about Germany keeping their damned noses out of our politics? Suppose as a further example, that Saudi Arabia cut our oil imports by forty percent until we found ways to shelter our homeless? It's a slippery slope, when we begin to tie international trade and aid to our current perception of human rights.

What then? Is it credible that we should just turn the other cheek?

I would make the point, that it's not our cheek to turn. I don't remember any particular concern about the rights of Cuba and the other countries in Central America, in the days before Castro when we were supporting the dictator Battista. Any old dictator was okay, as long as we ran the sugar and rubber plantations, as long as the economic purpose served our interests. But the legacy of that failed vision is that we've had the most stupid and abusive thirty-year relationship with Castro, ostensibly because his is a communist regime. The result has been terrible strife and privation for the Cubans.

What does that say to the world, that dictatorship is okay as long as we run the dictator, but communism is terrible, because we can't control Castro? That the Shah of Iran was really a pretty nice guy, but Chairman Deng is an unconscionable enemy of human rights?

If we were and are actually concerned about human rights, then the policy that best supports the everyday lives of Cubans would be paramount and not a knee-jerk reaction to their leader. There was a time when Castro was far more socialist than communist and asked our help, begged our help. We turned our backs and he found the necessary support from Russia, something we failed to foresee and could have prevented. Hence the bay of pigs, hence the Cuban missile crisis, hence (perhaps) the Kennedy assassination, hence, hence and more hence.

Currently, we're falling all over ourselves to pull Russia's economic fat out of the fire and yet we continue to try to strangle Cuba. The last time I glanced in their direction, Russia was also a communist country. They are however, a communist country we dare not let fail in the interests of world peace. No such condition exists in Cuba, much to the despair of Cuban nationals.

The Third World is not stupid, they see that our human rights bluster depends entirely upon our own self-interest and hasn't much at all to do with the rights of the unimpowered.
How then should we position ourselves in order to be more credible and effective, or do we have no responsibility at all in these matters?

I believe that of course we have a responsibility. Every free nation has a responsibility to try as best they can to spread the seed of freedom and human rights. But huffing and posturing, pressure and public condemnation all too often forces a polarization of positions and sets the stage for a backlash of further repression and a setting back rather than forward of the human rights clock. Particularly when our own hands are not all that clean. We have a lot of work to do here, insofar as human rights are concerned.

What then? Back off? Get out of the human rights business?

Absolutely not, the world still does look to us for a certain amount of leadership in that area, although we could be more effective with a lower volume of rhetoric. Perhaps we should apply the heat steadily, but with more moderation. We are a results-oriented society, but the rights of man have been a struggle over centuries.

It makes sense to me for the wealthy nations who espouse human rights among the poorer nations, to give far greater support within the United Nations. World opinion is far more important than American opinion in this regard. If sanctions are to be applied to rogue human rights nations, and I don't much believe in sanctions, they come with more moral persuasion from a majority of the countries of the world than one.The UN is not a toothless organization, no matter what Congress thinks. Americans are impatient with the UN, because we are the power in the world right now and the exercise of that power fuels our impatience. We'd like very much to fashion the world in the mirror-image of our American perceptions. But we won't always be the power and while there is time to make it strong, the United Nations must be made strong. I am convinced the people of the world will always thirst for human rights and freedom, but it must be the nations of the world that quench that thirst.

Why do I not much approve of sanctions? For one reason, I believe that human rights can only follow in the footsteps of economic growth. One has to be able to eat before the concept of freedom means much of anything. Sanctions are nearly always economic and in general they put the very people we're trying to help, flat on their back with a knife at their throat. Where's the human value in that?

Iraq is a very good example. The Saddam Husseins of the world are nearly always able to ride out sanctions, but the human cost is borne by those who have no possible way to effect the changes we hope for and expect. We seem to believe that sanctions will bring about a popular uprising against Saddam, as if Iraq were some kind of free democracy and he could be kicked or voted out. Even if that were so, it's not our right to become involved in the forcible change of another sovereign government, no matter how unlike us and abhorrent to our beliefs hat government may be.

The usual net result of sanctions is a deprivation of the living standard of an entire country and we are watching now, as the Iraqi citizens sink to their knees in hunger and sickness and social disorder. For generations, the legacy of that policy will be hatred of America.
But they say Saddam is a loose cannon, a destabilizing influence in the Middle East and threatens to become a nuclear power.

Well, there you have it. We either have a human rights policy or we scramble it with every other available issue until it can no longer be defined. They're right about Saddam Hussein, but who made him the threat he is? To a very large degree, we created Saddam. We've been shoving armaments down the throats of all the Middle Eastern countries for thirty years, making obscenely huge profits in the process, bought-off by our interest in their oil and then we're terribly surprised when war breaks out and they use those weapons. Yet the Iraqi citizen, who has had nothing to do with any of those decisions, is now suffering under sanctions.

How would I see it done differently? That requires a rehash of our Middle Eastern policy and this discussion concerns human rights. The point is, our Middle Eastern policy is a political policy, whether you agree with it or not. If we're to have any credibility at all on human rights issues, we have to separate them as much as possible from political policy.
We believe in and support human rights or we don't. We can't support them when they suit our political policy and abandon them when they don't. We are no longer believable to the have-nots of the world and it's hard to fault their judgment.

We do have political goals in the world and to the extent that they support our national interests, they are legitimate. But we make fools of ourselves when we are caught out, beating our chest over human rights as a cover for political or economic ambition.
How then would I propose to effectively separate the two?

The first step begins with honesty. We have to decide if we really give a damn about human rights. Presuming we do and I am certainly among those who do, the next decision is do we mean everybody's rights or just some of them? If we only mean some of them, we need to say so, to state publicly that we will support human rights when it suits our national interest to do so. That's not a very strong statement for a nation that purports to lead the world and a large part of the American public won't feel very good about it, but at least it's not hypocritical. If we mean everybody's rights and I count myself in this group, we can climb down off our soapbox and begin to work for that.

I will presume we mean everybody.

Then, as I said, I think it's absolutely of the highest importance that we get very strongly behind the UN on this issue. There's a huge amount of support for human rights issues in the world and we muddy the waters with a too public stance that drives errant nations to hard lines. World pressure can be brought more usefully to bear.

Second, if we truly believe in human rights issues, we need to weigh all of our international goals by that scale. Every decision can't be made on that basis alone, but we need to be honest and clear with ourselves on what we're doing from a human rights perspective and if it's supportable. If the honest answer is these people are just not important enough, then we need to admit we can only support human rights in our own self interest. As a practical matter, that's probably close to the truth. And it's another reason the UN is so important. They can support human rights, with our very active financial and diplomatic support, in areas where we just don't have enough at stake.

Third, we should be dealing constantly and unremittingly with human rights abuses in a low-key fashion. We wield enormous economic and military power in the world, but will be far more effective in the furtherance of human rights away from the spotlight of confrontation. Lowering the rate of abuse, imprisonment and torture of dissidents, opening the closed doors of journalism and easing the paths toward increasing degrees of personal freedom are all goals that can be best met by carrot-and-stick measures behind closed doors.

That sort of diplomatic work takes patience and a government that is committed without any restrictions, be they time or rhetoric. America needs to become more of a friend to the world.

Is that a logical solution for us politically?

I think it's pragmatic. The way we have historically presented ourselves on human rights issues has made us look very foolish and unreliable in huge areas of the world where we can no longer afford to be seen as foolish and unreliable.

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today