Let’s Not Sacrifice Ideals for Revenge

In uncertain times, it’s easy for bad ideas to gain currency. Consider these: The U.S. needs to shed idealism for realpolitik. The Central Intelligence Agency must be unleashed, assassinations resumed and dirty warfare embraced. In a new era when the enemy can strike anywhere, the U.S. needs to respond in kind. As the United States prepares for a long war on terrorism, democracy and human rights can no longer be a key part of foreign policy.

These views have become widespread and popular in the last three weeks. But they are also dangerous. Just as the U.S. would betray its heritage of freedom if it scrapped civil liberties at home, so it runs the risk of destroying its claim to moral leadership in defense of worldwide democracy if it adopts the tactics and mindset of its enemies. The U.S. runs the risk of repeating the mistakes that it made during the Cold War, when the campaign for democracy was repeatedly besmirched and undermined by the very means employed to save it.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration doesn’t seem to see it that way. A number of the president’s top advisors--like National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld--view human rights as a pesky distraction. Already, in its effort to gain Russian acceptance of our planned national missile defense system, the administration remained silent when Russian President Vladimir V. Putin quashed a free media and stepped up the war in Chechnya. Now, President Bush is requesting that Congress give him the authority to waive any restrictions on U.S. military assistance and weapons exports if he, and he alone, decides that a country can assist the U.S. in the battle against terrorism. The administration’s lifting of sanctions on Pakistan and India is understandable, but at what point would the president stop? He should not be given a blank check. And the United States should not be signaling to the world’s repressive regimes that we’ll look the other way as long as they’re with us on terrorism.

Then there is the question of foreign intelligence activities. The administration is also pushing for rolling back restrictions on the CIA that were adopted following the 1975 Church committee hearings. One rule that will most likely be rolled back is a regulation requiring that CIA officers not enlist known human-rights violators as agents. Even without such a rollback, the administration will almost certainly forego criticism of human-rights violations by China or other countries that promise to aid us in the fight against terrorism, thereby giving them free license to torture and kill.

Forgotten in the pell-mell rush to combat terrorism is that these rules and guidelines were not created out of thin air. They emerged in response to flagrant abuses that sullied our reputation with ally and enemy alike. The Church committee may have gone overboard, but the list it compiled of attempted and bungled U.S.-funded assassinations, ranging from the Congo to Cuba, still makes for damning reading. Moreover, many of these operations resulted in unintended negative consequences for the U.S. The most notable instance of this, of course, is the Taliban itself, which received equipment and training from the CIA. If the U.S. now backs the Afghani United Front with funding and weapons, will this rebel grouping ultimately prove more desirable than the Taliban?

Now the administration wants to make alliances with unsavory countries like Sudan and Uzbekistan, which is troubling in light of our history. In the name of anti-communism, President John F. Kennedy sent a motley crew of Cubans into the Bay of Pigs, and the CIA tried to assassinate Fidel Castro with exploding cigars. Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger supported the Greek colonels in 1969, backed a coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and carried out a secret and illegal bombing campaign against Cambodia that helped the Khmer Rouge rise to power. Jimmy Carter praised the shah of Iran’s devotion to freedom.

And the indifference to democratic values continued. By defining the Gulf War as simply being about oil and the return of Kuwaiti sovereignty, former President George Bush made it impossible for us to try and topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and abandoned the Kurds to poison-gas attacks. His administration looked the other way as Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic waged a war of ethnic cleansing against the Bosnians. Bill Clinton entered and exited Somalia and Haiti as quickly as he could, ignoring the humanitarian plight in those countries, and his administration deliberately and unconscionably refused to acknowledge that genocide was taking place in Rwanda. If the U.S. topples the Taliban, it cannot take the same hands-off attitude. Afghanistan will have to be reconstructed under U.N. auspices. President Bush says the U.S. should not engage in ‘nation-building.’ But should we simply be in the business of nation-destroying?

America’s humanitarian interventions, most recently in Kosovo, have not been, as the isolationists suggest, misguided. They are both moral and self-interested. All democracies share the same basic values and, so far, no democracy has ever gone to war with another democracy. The U.S. is the target of terrorists precisely because it stands for democratic values. It would be a terrible irony, if, in its zeal to combat terrorism, the Bush administration allowed friendly dictators a free hand to terrorize their own populations. Russia, China, Malaysia, and other countries have already embraced the fight against terrorism as free license to persecute minority groups. Embracing thuggery would be a declaration of surrender to the terrorists. Abandoning human rights and democracy isn’t just morally reprehensible. It’s self-defeating.