Friday, December 29, 2006

Dead Tyrants, Dead Justice

Two dead tyrants: Saddam and Pinochet. Two tragedies: that neither death is justice, whether the death came naturally or as the result of a bogus, politicized trial and state execution. Apologists for Pinochet on the right ought to be ashamed. Apologists for Saddam from the left ought to be ashamed. To the extent that neither are ashamed, they're moral cretins. The point is tyranny and the prescription is to bring tyrants to justice, real justice, for their abuses. Killing someone for expediency's sake or political reasons itself sleeps on the side of tyranny and only makes space for future tyrants and future states of exception.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

How do you deal justly with tyrants and dictators? Won't Elba get very full?

helmut said...

First, as a democracy, you start with a real trial. That happened in neither Saddam's nor Pinochet's case. But Pinochet had the advantage of people in high places protecting him, stalling. Saddam had the disadvantage of having lots of damaging information against the US if he were to have had a fair, open, and comprehensive trial.

Anonymous said...

So a fair trial would be the disclosure of this "damaging information against the US"? SO the goal is try not the dictator but the United States? I see where your priorities lie. Thank you for making it clear.

Is some great secret that we've tolerated thugs and dictators as long as they were friendly?

What range of penalties would be available to the jury in a fair open and comprehensive trial?

Saddam get's a suspended sentence and your true target, the President, is jailed?

helmut said...

Oh, yes, my priorities lie in damaging the US' fine reputation. That's what this is all about. In fact, I'd like to see the US prop up more dictatorial human rights abusers so that I can then try to expose that truth too in order to damage the US.

Anonymous said...

"Is some great secret that we've tolerated thugs and dictators as long as they were friendly?"


Tolerate them is one thing. Supporting them with money and weapons and giving them the green light to slaughter hundreds of thousands (like Gerald Ford, the "Healer of the Nation") is another entirely different thing.

In a fair trial, all parties involved in crimes get their due punishment. It's no secret that U.S. crimes go unpunished. What's wrong with wanting to mete out justice in a comprehensive way?

Pepito

Anonymous said...

"Is some great secret that we've tolerated thugs and dictators as long as they were friendly?'

Tolerate them is one thing. Funding them, providing them with weapons, promoting them and giving them green light to slaughter hundreds of thousands (like Gerald Ford, the "Healer of the Nation" did) is an entirely different thing.

A fair trial would have all participants in a crime receive their due punishment. It's no secret that American crimes go mostly unpunished. What is wrong with wanting to mete out justice in a comprehensive way?

Pepito

Anonymous said...

Helmut,

While I understand you are being facetious, that is in effect the result of your words. In any case, when I spoke of priorities yours are clear. The reason they are clear is because you spend all your passion and energy speaking about the abuses real and imagined committed by the U.S. and (as Pepito correctly puts it) those we've choosen to fund arm and then ignore.

While reflection on our policy choices, foreign or domestic, is a necessary and honorable task, it appears just as inwardly focused as any jingoistic give em hell red state fanatic. For all your knowledge of foreign affairs, you seem to see the U.S. as the author of all it with no other actors at all. As if we were some kid who just figured out what the sun and a magnifying glass can do to an ant colony.

My question stands. In your view, what range of penalties should be available to the jury in a fair, open and comprehensive trial?

Why is it more important to speak of our evils than evils done by anyone else? In a fair, open and COMPRHENSIVE trial would we not also focus on all parties involved?

Pepito -

Yes. Thank you. Open support is clearly even worse. But I believe even tolerance to be source of great enmity toward us. To have all this power and to permit these people to remain in power over so many. The source of contention in the Mid-East should not be our support of Isreal, but that we permit the dictators and and kinglets to continue abusing their own people.

Why should only the Iraqis be free? Why not the Saudis, the Syrians, and any parts of Iran that do not find value in the 14th century? And why cannot Christians be permitted in Lebanon of all places? Where is your glee when a member of Hamas is captured and brought to justice? Why do you reserve vitriol for your own and spare none for our enemies?

Anonymous said...

Anon:

I disagree with your contention that American "tolerance" for dictators is a source of great enmity towards the U.S. I think it's abundantly clear that other western countries that tolerate dictatorships are not subject to that kind of enmity. Granted, the U.S. has enormous military capabilities (although somewhat overrated, as the debacle in Iraq has revealed), but there is no reason to believe that the profound distaste for American policies is based on the fact that they haven't used their power enough. If anything, the prevailing thinking among the "enemies" of the U.S. is that they have used it too much, and in a very selective way, actively supporting dictators and then turning against them when the occasion is suitable. It doesn't take a genius to realize that this approach to foreign policy would rightly anger those who have directly suffered as a consequence of it. Public opinion in the rest of the world is very different from that in the U.S. and American hypocrisy in this respect is one of the main causes for the outrage that you see in other countries.

Something else that worries me about the kind of messianic approach to foreign policy that you favor is the fact that it has always been (and it's currently being)used for totally self-serving purposes, as a justification for imperial adventures whose real motives have nothing to do with their stated goals. If you tell yourself that the results are what really matters, history has shown, time and again, that the results of such endeavors are usually disastrous. When real goals differ from stated goals things get out of hand really fast and supposedly benign policies unravel, showing their ugly face. What has been done by the U.S. in Iraq doesn’t qualify as liberation: detrimental economical, political and social conditions were imposed on the people of Iraq almost immediately after the invasion, with the result that many of the people ended up longing for Saddam’s rule. There is also the fact that the occupation forces have shown a mixture of ignorance, incuriosity and contempt for those whom they are supposedly liberating. No doubt they would do the same again in the rest of the Middle East, and judging from your comment about the ‘Arab mind”, their supporters probably share their point of view.

I agree everybody should be free: the Saudis, the Syrians and also the Palestinians (particularly the latter, if only because of the fact that living under what amounts to a foreign military dictatorship seems to me even worse than living under the boot of one of your compatriots). But American power is not the way out of dictatorship. Apart from the fact of its evident incompetence, it has committed too many crimes in the Middle East (as in Latin America) for anybody to believe in the purity of its intentions. Arab citizens will never accept it.

Pepito

P.S. Who said that the Americans are my "own"? Who said that the Arabs are my "enemies"?

Anonymous said...

Pepito -

Yes at least a percentage the enmity I think arises from the perceived capability and our subsequent inaction or in the case of Iraq highly successful traditional combat, combined with an insufficient and indifferent counterinsurgency effort.

I'd be content to let those in the Mid-east handle their own thugs or even let the Chinese do it if someone outside the region must get involved.

I view 9/11 as a signal that the Arab world is willing to clean house themselves precisely because it has become sufficiently clear that we have not lived up to our own ideals.

You are also correct in your judgement that American power is insufficient for the task. The makeup of the armed forces is focused on mostly open combat that is so brutally efficient that it has caused many to refuse battle on those terms. Instead drawing such forces into populated areas causing massive civilian casualties.

The hypocricy you speak of is important because others cannot rely on us to do as we say we will. A reading of any of comments should make it clear I have no love for the selective nature of our (referring to citizens of the U.S. only) collective decisions about who will be the beneficiary of our "help" (the quote are for your unspoken derisive snort).

I do not know which nation you call home though my best guess given your nick is that you are a citizen of one of the country that were recipients of American attention in the past.

I didn't want to get involved when that crazy Austrian decided to have his fun. I didn't want to have anything to do with that paranoid Georgian Jughashvili decided he needed Eastern Europe as a buffer from us. I wanted to serve ice cream sodas to the pretty girls down on Hudson St.

I didn't care where the bananas for the splits came from. They tasted good.

I didn't want to get involved with stopping Mao or Uncle Ho cause they believed in self-determination just like me and mine. Bah communism! You grow out of that! That's what comes of learning philosophy from Germans! Better for both of them to have learned about the brewing of beer instead.

If they were good enough to fight the Japanese they should have been good enough for us. After all they came to us first and we blew them off. (cont'd)

Anonymous said...

(con'td)

Pepito -

I wanted nothing to do with establishing in 1948 a country by fiat where folks already lived and I knew no good could come from it. Why not give them the northern half of Greenland or part of Alaska or Canada?

If it were up to me I'd buy my oil from a loud fella in a cowboy hat and failing that find some other way to make the car go to the drivein.

But then some nutjob with a truck full of boom drops the roof on my friend John Price (who if he had any sense would have stayed home drinking beer and going to the drivein) was asleep at the time. So after 50 years of staying out of trouble as best I could, I plucked my head out of the sand and looked around and saw how it was coming back to bite me in the ass. I kind of took this bit of rudeness personal.

So when this particular dead man walking rolled into Kuwait in 1990 I was sorely upset cuz I knew that eventually we'd have to dig the bastard out to bury him and a whole bunch of people who had nothing directly to do with any of it (who were, as I had been, keeping their heads down) would have to pay for it.

I had no idea the government would wait so long to plant this guy and that we would have to do the job in shifts.

So I have no more patience for thugs and I'm happy at least one is finally dangling on a rope like a Christmas Ham. It's a damn shame noone put a rocket into Pinochet's car like they did to Somoza. I'd have settled for a streetlight and a little of the treatment Il Duce received.

I wish these psychotic bastards do us all a favor and eat a bullet like Hitler but they never seem to want to die alone.

So with the only party intent on doing anything out of the picture by dint of this previous hypocricy you've described so elequently, who will step forward?

The well-loved Spanairds who got a train blown up for expressing an interest?
The Germans, who no one wants to ever see with a rifle in their hands again?

The British whose hypocracy and double dealing in the region go back 100 years before the Barbary Pirates were kidnapping American Merchant Sailors?

Perhaps the French? Napoleon did such a fine job and I know they'd like that pretty canal they built in Egypt.

Perhaps the Russians yeah? They seem to love Afganistan so much they visit more often than the British.

Perhaps the Chinese? They have plenty of people and a respect for order. Since no one in the mid-east is demonstrating for democracy the general population should be perfectly safe!