The Bush Administration sounded the crusading
bugle call of both antiterrorism and human rights - as it occupied Iraq
to oust Saddam Hussein.
Yet riding harmoniously beneath the rhetoric of these twin crusades are
the classic practices of great power "realpolitik,"
realpolitik
fueled by the trauma of 9/11.
This time it is an "Americanized realpolitik" voiced in the classic
language of "frontier nationalism," proclaimed in the vernacular of the
historic American Indian fighter.
Realpolitik
cloaked in the idealistic rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson's call
for global democracy.
A "magic mix" of many American motivations, both "defensive" and
"offensive," helped seal Saddam's fate.
High on the list: Saddam Hussein was removed to prevent a rebellious
and ruthless dictatorship from thumbing its nose at the world's only
superpower. To send this message to other "rogue" nations which might
defy the United States:
"Beware, we are armed to the teeth,
a 'dragon,' not a 'paper tiger.' We will not hesitate to use force, if
necessary. We mean exactly what we say."
(For an examination of the problems faced by the United States
in overthrowing other sleazy, ruthless, defiant dictators in the past,
see Eytan Gilboa on how the first President Bush overthrew, captured
and imprisoned Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, "The Panama Invasion
Revisited: Lessons for the Use of Force in the Post Cold War Era," Political
Science Quarterly, v110 n4, p539, 1995).
"ECHOES OF MY
LAI" HELP UNDERMINE A
SHAKY "COMEBACK" A QUARTER CENTURY
IN THE MAKING
The U.S. approach to classic power politics was to destroy Saddam
Hussein's Iraq as an aspiring regional "hegemon" to maintain a dominant
American foothold in the oil-rich Middle East.
This was "realpolitik" in the shadow of 9/11. It took aim at a defiant,
unrepentant "loose cannon" with a history of unpredictability and a
penchant for harboring anti-Israeli, anti-American terrorists. A man
not likely to become a friend. A man no longer to be tolerated in a
strategic, delicate part of the world where Washington has deep
political and economic interests. A man who in the present or future
might develop an alliance with Osama Bin
Laden's al Qaida.
The Bush approach has always concerned future possibilities, not simply
existing weapons of
mass destruction. After 9/11 an American policy of preemptive
attack was developed to take out bases for terrorist action
before they became an imminent threat.
Yet when the second President Bush threw out of power Saddam's
long-term aspirations to dominate the Middle East, he destroyed a
"buffer" against a
revival
of Iranian power as the newest potential regional
hegemon.
With Iraq weakened by the resulting ethnic conflict and terrorism,
Americans have directly taken over, for now at least, as the regional
buffer against Shite Iran.
Only time will tell how much of a boost the Bush policy gives to the
very same revived Shite fundamentalist militant Iran which President
Reagan had built up Saddam to oppose -- way back during the Iran Iraq
war of the 1980's. The very same Iran which had tossed out the
American-backed Shah, held US hostages in late 1979, humiliated the
greatest power on earth.
*****************
So almost a quarter century after the 1979 Iranian
revolution traumatized Washington and threw out the Americans from that
oil rich country, the U.S. is back, restoring and enlarging its Middle
East "sphere of influence" -- this time in neighboring oil rich Iraq.
It was a shaky "comeback." American occupiers faced the danger of being
drawn into prolonged combat with a growing insurgency if they stayed --
or the danger of a civil war or anti-American government in power if
they left.
Then revelations of psychological and physical abuses by American
military, intelligence officials, and civilian contractors in American
run Iraq prisons caused global media shockwaves.
Whether directly ordered or informally occurring, American efforts to
"soften up" prisoners for interrogation appeared a natural consequence
of stepped up fighting with insurgents, which took an increasing number
of American lives.
The revelations put Americans "in the dock" as accused violators of
human rights. Deeply on the defensive was the American claim that
dedication to human rights motivated its presence in Iraq. Major
national and international human rights groups such as Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch joined to urge
changed American policies.
Adding to the embarrassment was a symbolic link with the 1968 My
Lai massacre by American soldiers during the Vietnam War.
A May 2004 article in The New
Yorker Magazine by Seymour M. Hersh, the very same American
journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre, detailed prison abuses
revealed by American soldiers and military investigators. As in the
case of My Lai, American soldiers appeared to have "blown the whistle,"
then a journalist spread the word.
A second
May New Yorker piece by Hersh reported a decision approved last
year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld expanded a highly secret
operation, previously focused on the hunt for al Qaeda, to
interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.
This second report, strongly denied by the Pentagon, maintained the
change expanded the power of American intelligence operatives in Iraq
prisons and increased the use of psychological intimidation and sexual
humiliation in efforts to squeeze fresh intelligence from detainees.
A September 24, 2005
report by Human Rights Watch based on allegations by
American military officers suggested American military leaders had
directly or indirectly encouraged beatings and other torture of
prisoners in Iraq. The alleged violations in violation of the Geneva
conventions were said to be aimed at softening up prisoners for
interrogation.
Reported prison abuses hardly matched the death of over 300 Vietnamese
civilians at My Lai. Still, once again media reporting on human rights
issues appeared to have rocked the American and international political
scene.
The issue threatened to become a part of the American presidential
election. Democrats seized on it to call for the resignation of Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a tactic designed to undermine President
Bush in 2004 elections.
TERRORISM AS A
"NEW" FORM OF GUERRILLA WAR
ERODES THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS' RULES OF WAR
The current "war" against terrorism in Iraq and
elsewhere can be seen as a "new" form of guerrilla war,
a
war without fronts, a war without rules. Where modern communications
and even modern weaponry can be used by a weak "underdog" in surprise
attacks aimed at punishing, terrorizing a modern Goliath.
When Americans think of guerrilla war, they are likely to fix on the
Vietnam War which so expensively frustrated the United States. It is
important to remember that guerrilla wars have come in many shapes and
sizes, with differing outcomes. We are back to a form of conflict as
ancient as war itself.
The Geneva
Conventions too rarely moderate this form of conflict,
although that has long been a goal of the International Committee of the Red
Cross. Taking hostages, extortion, summary executions and
torture of prisoners have long been a hallmark of guerrilla war.
(See this writer's A
Century
of Guerrilla War: the Human Rights Connection; see
also a 2002
ICRC
editorial on humanitarian law, terrorism, 9/11, and
guerrilla conflict which argues civilians are increasingly the target
of modern conflicts and that treatment of prisoners in these conflicts
creates difficult new challenges).
Current American practices of removing suspected al Qaeda captives from
coverage of the Geneva conventions and placing them in secret
interrogation centers reflect the reality that the US is in a modern
form of guerrilla war.
The same applies to the prison scandals. A form of "counter terror" --
vengeance, intimidation in the name of intelligence gathering -- is a
frequent occurrence in guerrilla war, when the stakes appear to be life
and death. Since good intelligence is essential to winning a guerrilla
war, it can be tempting to think "anything goes."
It needs to be understood that this form of "counter terror" is deeply
rooted in the nature of terrorism and guerrilla war. It is not simply
the Americans who erode the rules. It is also the people who choose to
launch this kind of combat, to organize and promote it on both a
regional and global scale.
WAY BACK "WHERE
IT ALL BEGAN"
It "all began" when both the United States and the Soviet Union were
reeling under the "threat" of militant Islam.
The rise of militant Iranian clerics, the overthrow of the Shah in
January 1979 and the November 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy and
hostages in Teheran humiliated Washington at the same time it raised
concern in Moscow.
In late 1978 this correspondent interviewed in Beijing,
China a Soviet diplomat who expressed great fear of Islamic militancy
spilling northward into the Soviet Union.
"They are dirty people," he said. "Only God knows if we will have world
war."
It was in part Moscow's perception that Islamic militancy might spill
over into its own southern minorities which triggered the December
1979
Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. Moscow's expansive fear of Islam
thus took it into direct confrontation with the U.S., which then chose
under President Ronald Reagan to support Islamic guerrillas against the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Meanwhile the U.S. threw its military backing to Iraq's Saddam Hussein
hoping his 1980
invasion of Iran might undermine anti-American Iranian
Islamic leaders. Then, after Iran and Iraq made peace in 1988, US-Iraq
relations soured. Saddam Hussein began his long confrontation with the
U.S. by invading Kuwait in 1990.
The Cold War is over. Islamic militancy is stronger than ever. Now,
after taking out Saddam Hussein, the United States is back -- though
not yet in Iran.
With an expansive fear of terrorism it conducts a costly comeback --
and hopes to shape the future of this oil rich region -- to build an
ever larger "sphere of influence" extending right up into the oil rich
states which once made up part of the southern Soviet Union.
HUMAN RIGHTS AS
BUSH POLICY JUSTIFICATION
The American approach in Iraq justified itself, in
part, on Saddam's human rights abuses.
Indeed the Bush Administration has been deeply sensitive to human
rights concerns of the "evangelical coalition." The
New
York Times noted October 26, 2003 that these religious
groups have driven aspects of foreign policy and won major
appointments; that they were instrumental in making sure that the
president included extensive remarks on sex trafficking in his speech
to the United Nations General Assembly in September, 2003.
Still the ouster of Saddam Hussein marked a sharp departure from the
"universalistic" global moralism of the human rights movement.
It was instead a blending of many classic themes, including the time
honored approach often identified as "born in Europe." The approach
known as "realpolitik," popularized by former Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger, is the exact opposite of the moral crusade.
The language is similar, whether against al Qaeda's terrorists or
Saddam Hussein's "rogue state." Texan
President George W. Bush uses the fighting words of what Walter
Russell Mead calls the "Jacksonian
tradition" in American foreign policy.
There need be "no quarter" for savages who break the laws of civilized
war to pillage defenseless women and children. Today's version of
"savage" is any state or movement which carries out or shelters
international terrorism, including the spread of "weapons of mass
destruction."
"Hunt 'em down...we're smoking 'em out...we have 'em on the
run...dead or alive...we'll bring 'em to justice....victory under God."
Frontier
General;
Indian Fighter
Seventh
President
(1829-1837)
RESHAPE THE
MIDEAST, ENLARGE U.S. "SPHERE OF INFLUENCE"
The flexing of American muscle was aimed against a
distant "hypothetical:" a gradually rearmed Iraq, including possible
future nuclear weapons, might eventually threaten America's power in
the region by "forcing" Iraq's oil rich neighbors to accommodate with
Baghdad. At the very least, Saddam's support for anti-Israeli
terrorists challenged the deepening American-Israeli alliance against
what both Tel Aviv and Washington define as their common enemy:
"terror."
*****
Here are some Bush Administration calculations on how the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein will help reshape the Mideast in accordance
with U.S. interests:
Inflammatory American bases in conservative Saudi Arabia will be less
necessary with the end of no fly zones to contain Iraq. Post Saddam
Iraq will itself also offer possibilities for American bases, thus
increasing the range of strategic choices for U.S. planners.
Washington's newly demonstrated willingness to use overwhelming
military power may put pressure on neighboring Iran, strengthening its
moderates and undermining its Islamic fundamentalists.
A dozen years of confrontation and sanctions against a defiant
Saddam Hussein had closed off rich
Iraq
oil fields to full international and American oil
exploitation. Without removal of Saddam, more aggressive exploration
and use of Iraq's oil could strengthen the regime and increase its
power and threat to the region .
Whatever the immediate uncertainties, the overthrow of Saddam will,
over the long haul, open up those fields and reduce the comparative
significance of Saudi and other oil resources. "Containment" of Saddam
Hussein limited Iraq's oil production. "Regime Change" promises to
expand it.
(On the implications of Saddam Hussein's defeat for Iraq oil, see the
nuanced discussion by David Isenberg in Asia
Times, January 3, 2003. See The
Guardian, January 23, for reports the U.S. military plans to
seize Iraq's oil fields to protect them from destruction by Saddam
Hussein, thus preserving them for future production.)
American leaders also hope the overthrow of Saddam help make the Middle
East a safer environment for Israel, which enjoys strong support from
both Left and Right of the American political spectrum.
Friends of Israel often felt the Jewish state could be threatened if
Saddam were allowed to move toward nuclear armed hegemony in the Middle
East. Iraq money helped support suicide bombings against Israel. With
Washington now less dependent on Saudi Arabia for bases (and ultimately
for oil), some of Israel's more hawkish supporters hope the U.S. will
be freer to pressure the Saudis to clamp down on aid from its nationals
to anti-Israel Palestinian terrorists.
******
The occupation and reconstruction of Iraq costs the U.S.
government billions of dollars -- how much depending in part on how
quickly Iraq oil production can be brought back on line. The sweeter
side is that an American dominated postwar Iraq government can be hoped
to give major contracts to U.S. companies in fields such as telecommunications.
Americans
can be expected to benefit at the expense of countries such
as France.
A
U.S. Department of Commerce website
outlines American business opportunities in Iraq and charts contracts
already awarded. But all of this is still up in the air.
Since the late 1960's Paris has sought to build economic and political
ties with Iraq, partly to counter the "Anglo-Saxon" influence of the
U.S. and Britain in Mideast countries such as oil rich Iran. Almost a
quarter century after the 1979 Iranian revolution threw out Americans,
the U.S. is back, restoring and enlarging its "sphere of influence" --
this time in neighboring Iraq.
AFTER 9/11: "NEW NATIONALISM" AND THE
"SAVAGE WARS OF PEACE"
Little of the case for "regime change" is new. Yet before September 11
those in the American foreign policy establishment who favored Saddam
Hussein's overthrow faced the hard reality that many Americans would
not support war with Iraq. The destruction of the World Trade Center
and the growing public fear of terrorism changed all that.
"Old threats should be looked at through new eyes," became the
philosophy of the Bush Administration. "The best defense is an
offense," "lean forward" to destroy any government which defiantly may
provide a haven for people planning a repetition of terrorist attacks
against the U.S.
Now the government could mobilize public support for a possible war
with emotional
propaganda
appeals to fan fear of terrorism and portray
Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden as past, present, or future allies.
"What if Saddam should distribute weapons of mass destruction to
terrorists targeting the United States?" advocates of overthrowing the
Iraq President could "ask."
"Remember 9/11" could join "Remember the
Alamo," (Mexican War), "Remember
the Maine," (Spanish-American War), and "Remember Pearl
Harbor" (World War II) as rallying calls for the march
toward war.
The ground grew fertile for a new generation of American nationalistic
thinkers to join older "hawks" in embrace of war to expand a "Pax
Americana." For a striking example of this fresh expansive nationalism
see Max Boot, The
Savage
Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power
(2003). (To form the title of his book Boot borrowed part of Rudyard
Kipling's sardonic analysis of colonialism, an 1899 poem, "The
White Man's Burden.")
"Take up the White Man's
burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.....
"Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought."
As the war progressed, a fresh
wave of security conscious American pro war nationalism
spread among undergraduates on American campuses -- sometimes to the
chagrin of an older generation of antiwar professors with views shaped
by the Vietnam war.
The Bush Administration's 31 page National Security
Strategy, released September 2002, provided the conceptual
foundation for a strengthened "Pax Americana." It called for American
dominance as the lone superpower - a status no rival power would be
allowed to challenge. (See a Christian
Science
Monitor analysis by Gail Russell Chaddock, September
23, 2002.)
SETTLING OLD
SCORES: THE PERSONAL FACTOR
Stoking fuel on the fire is the deep seated
animosity between the Bush family and Saddam Hussein more than a decade
after the current president's father led a coalition in 1991 to drive
Saddam's invading army out of Kuwait. A reportedly Iraq sponsored assassination
attempt on the first President Bush in 1993 (after Bill
Clinton replaced him in office) has left both father
and son
Bush making bitter public personal attacks on Saddam
Hussein.
A May 30, 2004 news
dispatch that the younger Bush proudly keeps the pistol
Saddam carried when captured as a White House trophy to proudly show
visitors underscores the "settling of old scores" character the war
against Saddam has taken.
(For an attempt to unravel the "puzzling past" of the Bush
Administration's decision to move toward possible war with Iraq see a
January 12 account by Glenn Kessler in the Washington
Post.)
HUMAN RIGHTS AND
THE PROPAGANDA WAR
Encouraged by the American government, media coverage of Saddam
Hussein's vast human rights abuses joined media-driven obsession with
terrorism as vivid propaganda in the move toward war. Such "on-team"
coverage fueled the patriotic mission, as an indirect tool of American
foreign policy. It strengthened national unity and helped build popular
support for possible sacrifices ahead.
Irene Khan, Amnesty International Secretary General, declared in a
recent release:
"The human rights situation in Iraq is being
invoked with unusual frequency by some western political leaders to
justify military action. This selective attention to human rights is
nothing but a cold and calculated manipulation of the work of human
rights activists. Let us not forget that these same governments turned
a blind eye to Amnesty International's reports of widespread human
rights violations in Iraq before the Gulf War. They remained silent
when thousands of unarmed Kurdish civilians were killed in Halabja in
1988."
While the Bush Administration exploited human rights issues
to build sympathetic media coverage and rally popular support, Iraq
countered American pressure by exploiting global human rights
sensitivities over suffering of Iraq's civilians.
Bush Administration analysis of Iraq disinformation tactics exploiting
human rights issues became part of the American propaganda war, with
the January 21 release of an extensive study entitled Saddam's
Disinformation and Propaganda 1990-2003, downloadable in
.pdf format.
"Saddam is almost certain to lay a trap for the world's media. He
apparently believes that dead Iraqi civilians are his most powerful
weapon in trying to create revulsion against any military action that
might occur against Iraq," argued the White House report.
THE KISSINGER
SYMBOLISM
Under former President Bill Clinton human rights
global "universalism" seemed to have the upper hand. In his early days
the second President Bush seemed to tilt towards "realism." He placed
less emphasis on universal human rights enforcement with a greater
reluctance to commit troops for peacekeeping.
"Realists" reject unlimited pursuit of universal goals such as human
rights or democracy as dangerous expressions of American religious
zealotry and delusions of omnipotence. "Spokespersons" for this
thinking in the 1950's were theologian Reinhold
Niebuhr (Niebuhr quotations),
political
scientist Hans
Morgenthau, diplomat George
Kennan, and Henry
Kissinger, the immigrant German Jewish Harvard professor who
was later to become President Nixon's secretary of state.
After 9/11 a fresh Bush-inspired "war on terrorism," seemed to veer
back towards universalism and put the "realist" approach under further
attack. Both human rights and antiterrorism crusades reject "realism" -
which embraces the necessity of military violence in pursuit of limited
national interests, and seeks a stable international structure where
limited pragmatic solutions replace moral crusades.
Then, as the President moved to invade Iraq, nationalistic
"realpolitik," disguised as a global crusade against terrorism, seemed
to reemerge.
One "symbol" of the change: on November 27, 2002 President Bush
appointed Henry A. Kissinger, the best known, most controversial symbol
of the "realist" school to head a commission investigating the
September 11 attack. Kissinger resigned the post December 13 on grounds
controversy over possible conflicts of interests involving his many
foreign clients might damage the consulting company he had build. The
likelihood his appointment would spotlight charges he is a war criminal was undoubtedly an important
reason for his withdrawal.
The accusations against Kissinger
spotlight a tendency: to judge as criminals foreign policy architects
who see themselves as practitioners of realism in a world of inevitably
violently competing national interests.
Still, the Kissinger appointment symbolized the
abiding importance of "realpolitik." -- even when disguised in the
traditional rallying language of American moral crusades.
(For a thorough discussion of the issues around realism and
universalism in American foreign policy thinking, wee Robert D. Kaplan,
"Kissinger, Metternich and Realism" in the Atlantic
Monthly, June 1999. See also Walter Isaacson's biography, Kissinger,
1992.)
IMPACT OF KOSOVO
The emergence of human rights
issues as a propaganda tool in the American campaign to gather public
support against Saddam Hussein leaves media human rights coverage far less an
independent influence on policy -- compared to the situation which led
up to the 1999 NATO bombing to stop ethnic cleansing in
Kosovo.
Media images of human rights abuse in the former Yugoslavia functioned
as a far more independent prod on the United States and its allies to
use military force.
The debate over NATO bombing of Serbia over Kosovo illustrated how
deeply the traditional distinctions between right and left in the
United States were upended by the split over whether military force
should be used against human rights abuses.
Some liberals, traditionally hostile to military force during the Cold
War, openly espoused stern military action against Serbia. These
included antiwar liberal intellectuals like Susan Sontag and Democratic
lawmakers like Sen. Tom Harkin.
Right by their side were conservative stalwarts like William Kristol,
editor of The Weekly Standard, Republican Sen. John
McCain, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN delegate during the Reagan
administration.
Other conservatives such as Pat Buchanan and Senate Majority Leader
Trent Lott said the United States should stay out. "Give peace a
chance," said Lott. He sounded remarkably like former President Jimmy
Carter and Tom Hayden, the former leader of the Students for a
Democratic Society who became a California state senator.
David
Rieff, a champion of human rights causes, argued in the New
York
Times Magazine of August 8, 1999 that the human rights
movement is in trouble, despite its triumph in Kosovo. He argued some
of the movement's frailty stems from the failure to tame China and from
general compassion fatigue. He saw a major weakness in what he views as
a failure by activists to generate popular support for human rights
causes.
Still it seems clear that "watchdog" reporting on television and in
print can stir public emotions with graphic images of human suffering.
Graphic television and newspaper coverage provided graphic emotional
support for NATO's decision to militarily intervene.
Once again, as with the Spanish American War,
media
coverage of overseas human rights issues "set the stage" and
"fueled the fires."
In 1898 human rights reporting justified a war which opened the door to
American empire in Cuba and the Philippines. By 1999 human rights
reporting opened the door to war and peacekeeping operations by
international coalitions.
How did we get there?"
REBELLIOUS
FREEDOM SETS THE STAGE: MARGARET FULLER
The relatively recent "explosion" of human rights
reporting should not obscure its deeper historical roots in the growth
of American journalism and the expansion of U.S. interests overseas.
Early human rights journalism of the Nineteenth Century was directed
toward readers who, to one degree or another, were influenced by values
such as these:
Traditional American opposition to European empire, a bulwark of
American thinking since the Revolution, expressed itself most pointedly
in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. This warned European powers not to
establish footholds in the New World.
Americans schooled in principles of the Bill of Rights and the
Constitution and liberties, could feel an affinity with independence
fighters such as Bolivia's Simon Bolivar - or to anyone else who
invoked the principles of the American Revolution to justify opposition
to the power of what was seen as a medieval and autocratic Spanish
empire.
Thus even in the 19th Century advocates of expanded America's influence
could use human rights principles to justify opposition to what was
that day's counterpart to the Soviet antagonist President Reagan
labeled "the evil empire."
There also was a human rights oriented sympathy for Republican based
anti-monarchical movements in Europe, such as the revolutions of 1848
in France, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Margaret Fuller,
the
first great American woman foreign correspondent, passionately and
sympathetically covered these upheavals for The New York Tribune
of Horace
Greeley.
Sympathetic coverage of these developments included the activities of
refugees such as the Hungarian Louis Kossuth. When such revolutions
failed, refugees received a sympathetic reception by American readers
interested in seeing the principles of their own revolution accepted
abroad.1)
Late nineteenth century American human rights coverage very
often spotlighted instances in which "medieval" empires - sometimes
seen as barbaric and "Eastern" - persecuted ethnic and/or religious
groups with which Western readers could identify.
News accounts often based on Western diplomats and missionaries
spotlighted the plight of Christian minorities such as the Armenians in
the Muslim Ottoman empire and other groups which suffered repression in
the Ottoman ruled Balkans. Persecution of Chinese Christians was also
covered.2)
Emergence of the United States as a melting pot of
immigrants and refugees indirectly increased interest in overseas human
rights abuses. Newcomers entering beneath the Statue of Liberty on
freighters and passenger liners often sought refuge from poverty,
religious intolerance, and political tyranny overseas.
Some arrivals had a special interest in human rights abuses back home.
Some organized resistance movements in the United States by soliciting
money and even organizing military expeditions such as the
"filibusters" who fought the Spanish in Cuba.3)
THE
CHRISTIAN WEST IN SACRED BATTLE
These concerns were highly compatible with a
Victorian world view. This saw the Christian White West as bearer of
civilization and progress against savage darker primitive tribes or
medieval empires based on more primitive and non-Christian religion.
Anti-Catholic feeling in mostly Protestant nineteenth century America
made it easier to view the Spanish Empire as an abuser. Victorians
sometimes saw the "savage" oppressor as influenced by barbaric
"Asiatic" traditions.
Thus reporting often spotlighted sensational abuses in the Islamic
Ottoman Empire or in non-Christian China or by "medieval" Spain.
The affect of this reporting was to discredit old empires - be they
Chinese, Russian, Spanish, or Ottoman. For the most part this did not
profoundly embarrass the U.S. government which could sit on the
sidelines, generally without being forced to decide with which empire
to align itself.
The impact of human rights reporting in America was thus different than
in Europe where it could embarrass diplomats seeking to justify
alliances with sometimes repressive governments.
In England, for example, William Gladstone's Liberal Party could use
reports of Turkish brutalities to criticize Benjamin Disraeli's Tory
government policy of supporting the Ottoman Empire as an ally against
Russia. Human rights reporting from the Ottoman Empire embarrassed the
British alliance with what is now Turkey.
The deeply religious and idealistic Gladstone cited human rights abuses
in his 1876 pamphlet, Bulgarian Horrors and the Questions of the East,
which attacked the Disraeli government for its indifference to Turkish
suppression of the Bulgarian rebellion.
Gladstone's attack on Disraeli's pro-Turkish policy in the Midlothian
campaign of 1879-80 brought the Liberals back to power in 1880.)
Allegations against Disraeli's ally Turkey thus foreshadowed
embarrassment later human rights reporting on America's sometimes
authoritarian Cold War allies could bring to Washington's efforts to
contain the Soviet Union.
Victorian age newspapers could portray themselves as agents of
civilized progress by focusing the spotlight of publicity on what were
seen as holdovers from a barbaric past. As in the case of Cuba
newspapers could sometimes portray and promote themselves as heroically
prodding recalcitrant Western governments into humanitarian action.
Early American human rights reporting could thus strike a sympathetic
intellectual and emotional chord among segments of American readership,
even though the American public was far less international in its
education and interests than it is today.
As education and literacy progressed, mass produced big city newspapers
experimented with all kinds of self-promotion techniques ranging from
solving crimes which had police stumped, to exposing corruption to
exposing the practices of insane asylums by sending in feature writers
disguised as patients.4)
One method of self-promotion was to scoop the opposition in
exposing what could be portrayed as brutal and medieval overseas
tyranny. In so doing a newspaper could boastfully demonstrate its
"state-of-the-art" cable technology as one of the wonders of the
scientific Victorian age.
Publishers and headline writers of the day were proud to trumpet
details of some overseas massacre to the reading public even before the
State Department in Washington officially learned of it.
A newspaper could boastfully take pride if its cabled dispatches forced
public protest, a debate in Congress, an official American complaint,
or even action by Western governments to punish outrages against
foreign minorities or Western missionaries.5)
The abuses most frequently spotlighted were committed by
peoples or nations different from Americans. A common view was these
peoples had not yet been sufficiently learned what the civilized world
and especially the American experience had to teach.
Very rarely would press accounts focus on abuses committed by Western
powers or by American forces, for example in wars against American
Indians.
TAKING ON
AMERICAN ATROCITIES
However there was limited reporting on allegations
of American atrocities against Filipino independence fighters when such
allegations were made by Congressional and other critics of American
pacification of the Philippines following the Spanish American War.
Such reporting could be cited by critics of jingoistic American
imperialism as they waged a losing campaign against their country's
Asian and Caribbean expansion. (See Imperialism
in
the Making of America. For a discussion of opposition to
imperialism in America see Anti-Imperialism
in the United States, 1898-1935. For a prominent opponent of
American imperialism see Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire:
Anti-Imperialism and Mark Twain on the Philippines. For
a pictorial account of the Philippines war see Stereoscopic Visions of War and Empire.
For
a missionary account of American empire building in the Philippine
see Stories of Benevolent Assimilation)
American correspondents covered the brutal campaigns of 1902, and there
was press coverage of Congressional hearings in which critics of United
States colonialism spotlighted some of these allegations. This debate
and press coverage of it can be seen as a small scale precursor of the
debate over the Vietnam War.
Commanders of the American pacification forces, such as Major General
Adna Romanza Chaffee were often Civil War veterans steeled in bitter
frontier warfare with the American Indian. In January 1902 Brigadier
General J. Franklin Bell's force of 4,000 drove into Batangas province
partly in retaliation for the brutal massacre of American troops a year
earlier in Samar province.
Bell's forces took no prisoners and, according to an American
correspondent, killed men, women, and children, active insurgents, and
suspected people with "an idea prevailing that the Filipino was little
better than a dog." It was not civilized warfare, the correspondent
wrote, yet added, "We are not dealing with a civilized people. The only
thing they know is force, violence and brutality, and we give it to
them."
A select Senate committee on the Philippines opened hearings in January
1902 with a minority membership of Administration critics, usually
Democrats, questioning the policies of Republican President Taft.
Officers and men testified as to atrocities and newspapers covered the
accounts, sometimes corroborated by letters American soldiers had sent
to their families.6)
It is also important to
understand American strategy placed major importance on "winning hearts and minds," that pacification efforts included civic
construction, schools, and many other programs seen as both important
to quiet rebellion and bring "civilization."
For the most part early human rights reporting was
bolstered by the belief in superior White American values as bearers of
progress and modern civilization. This sense of America's civilizing
mission was largely untainted by a sense of guilt or "mea culpa" that
was to later develop after World War II and especially after the
Vietnam War.
The sense that American actions should be questioned or that America
might be backing the "wrong side" could most dramatically be symbolized
by John Hersey's account in the New Yorker Magazine of the
suffering left by America's atomic bombing of Hiroshima and by Seymour
Hersh's 1969 exposure in Dispatch News Service of the U.S. army
massacre of civilians in the Vietnamese hamlet My Lai.7)
YELLOW
JOURNALISM: A HUMAN RIGHTS BANNER
The "yellow journalism" which helped push President
McKinley into war with Spain in 1898 is frequently viewed as
irresponsible, jingoistic sensationalism rather than as human rights
reporting. Many historians point out it grew out of the circulation war
between the Hearst chain, especially the New York Journal, and
the Pulitzer chain, especially the New York World. Such
reporting did not use the term "human rights," which did not spring
into full prominence until after World War II. Yet practitioners of
"yellow journalism" could justify their craft with a view that it was
an clarion call for reform and civilized progress, bringing public
light to barbarism and corruption and thereby forcing governments to
walk along civilization's path. James Creelman,
a
correspondent at different times for both Pulitzer and Hearst chains,
defended yellow journalism against its critics in this way:
"How little they know of 'yellow journalism' who
denounce it! How swift they are to condemn its screeching headlines,
its exaggerated pictures, its coarse buffoonery, its intrusions upon
private life and occasional inaccuracies! But how slow they are to see
the steadfast guardianship of public interests which it maintains! How
blind to its unfearing warfare against rascality, its detection and
prosecution of crime, its costly searchings for knowledge throughout
the earth, its exposures of humbug, its endless funds for the quick
relief of distress."8)
Just as important, sensational reports of rapes, impaling,
and burnings alive provided a violent, bizarre twist bound to make
"good copy" at a time when circulation hungry publishers in the "yellow
press" frequently spotlighted rapes, lynchings, suicides, and madness
in domestic coverage. As today, graphic accounts of violence helped
compensate for the abstract, remote quality of much overseas news.
Accounts of such savagery became the international equivalent of crime
reporting. They frequently spotlighted atrocities against what in
Victorian thinking would be protected groups (women, children, and more
broadly civilians. Press accounts might also spotlight uncivilized acts
committed in war.9)
Such early human rights reporting got a boost in the
"yellow press" because the barbarities it recorded were well suited to
the sensational headlines and accounts of violence which might
titillate readers and sell papers. Concern over human rights is often
viewed as an idealistic and lofty preoccupation, but even today a
reader interest oriented editor may see human rights reporting as
"salable" precisely because it often contains shocking accounts of
suffering and violence with an element of emotional human interest.
Today, as in the past, the line between "serious" human rights
reporting and entertainment oriented "sensationalism" may sometimes be
uncertain.
OF CABLE, MISSIONARIES, AND THE WHITE MAN'S
BURDEN
Early American human rights reporting developed in
the aftermath of the Civil War. Railroads, pioneers, and the U.S.
cavalry gradually united, settled, and pacified the country's West.
Smokestacks of a growing industrial economy supported growing
commercial and missionary involvement throughout the world, especially
in Asia and Latin America.
Reporting on overseas atrocities became an early way in which the
American public - no longer preoccupied with the Civil War - could
relate to the overseas world at a time when the United States had not
yet embarked on overseas wars or alliances.
At times exposure of overseas brutality seemed to justify American
noninvolvement in the cynical power politics that seemed to require
cooperation with empires. At other times human rights reporting seemed
to justify an expansion of American influence - even the use of
military force if that were necessary to advance civilization or "take
up the "White Man's Burden." - as during the Spanish-American War.10)
Major big city newspapers hungry for increased circulation
and advertising revenue proudly tried to dazzle their readers with a
sense of just how successfully they were using the fruits of that day's
"hi tech" revolution to expose barbarities not yet ended by the spread
of Christianity and scientific values. Subject matter for these reports
came from a number of that era's broader historical developments:
The expansion of cable transmitted reporting on the wars of conquest
European colonialists waged in Africa and Asia. Atrocities committed by
tribes or armies opposing European colonialism in Africa and Asia -
especially against women and children - were sometimes defined as
newsworthy offenses against the advance of civilization even though the
American revolutionary tradition was hostile to European empire.
American readers could view with sympathy the plight of Europeans in
areas such as "Darkest Africa" at a time when Americans watched their
own cavalry putting down what were seen as savage Indian revolts
against innocent pioneers.11)
The expansion of American missionary activities into areas
such as China, the Ottoman Empire, and Africa meant readers could
sympathize with the victims of savage attacks on such missionaries and
their local converts. American missionaries overseas meant there were
"American stories" overseas, stories inherently of interest to local
readers. Overseas missionaries could alert foreign correspondents of
brutalities. Returning missionaries could draw additional media
coverage by speaking in American churches and meeting halls on the
plight of overseas Christians. They could also lobby American and other
governments for protection.12)
In Asia the vision of a great China market went hand in
hand with the vision of saving souls. U.S. missionaries and trading
ships penetrated a weakened China increasingly carved into "spheres of
influence" by British, French, German, Russian, and later Japanese
bankers, soldiers, and administrators. In the age of the transpacific
cable American newspapers showed increased interest in Asia by running
wire service news or accounts both cabled and mailed by American
correspondents or part-time contributors.
As more Americans traveled to China to trade and proselytize, U.S.
newspapers would cover Chinese brutalities against Chinese Christians
or foreign missionaries, as well as efforts by America's European
competitors to further carve up China into colonial enclaves that might
restrict American activities.
This coverage, combined with accounts of returning travelers and
missionaries, helped shape the American mind set of special support for
China, leading eventually to siding with China against Japan's invasion
in the 1930's and to war with Japan in 1941.13)
ANTI-SEMITISM:
EXPOSING
THE SCANDALS
Issues of religious liberty were intensely involved
in American coverage of two 1890's controversies involving
anti-Semitism. One was the 1894 treason conviction of Captain Alfred
Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, in a trial involving
alleged espionage for Germany. The case became an international scandal
when evidence uncovered in 1896 suggested Dreyfus was innocent and had
been improperly convicted because of anti-Semitism.
Some American newspapers gave heavy coverage to 1898 trial of Major
Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, who was acquitted in a matter of minutes
despite new evidence he, not Dreyfus, was the guilty party. American
newspapers also covered the libel conviction of author Emile Zola, a
staunch Dreyfus defender.
The upsurge of anti-Semitism in Czarist Russia following the
assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 also drew American press
coverage. Reports of pogroms, in addition to the flood of Jewish
immigrants to the United States, created press interest in the United
States - stimulated by outspoken criticism of Russian anti-Semitism by
prominent Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt.
The issue of Russian anti-Semitism was tied in with the seesaw battle
between reformist Czars and officials who periodically tried to bring
Russia closer to Europe and the autocrats who repeatedly bounced back
to block reform. In the fashion of the times this could be seen as a
clash between champions of modern civilization and remnants of Asiatic
medieval darkness. A number of U.S. papers covered reports of growing
Russian anti-Semitism in 1891, including the New York Herald which
dispatched then Europe - based correspondent James Creelman to
investigate and the New York World which considered sending Russian
expert George Kennan to do a special investigation.14)
OPENING THE RED CROSS DOOR: BREAKING FROM
RAPE
Early consciousness of what might today be called
human rights abuses got a boost from the growth of legal conventions
such as the Geneva Convention of 1864. This granted medical workers the
right to be treated as protected neutrals when they treated sick or
wounded soldiers in time of war.
So began the modern effort to codify the "laws of war."
The group of Swiss citizens who brought about this agreement under the
leadership of Henri Dunant ultimately became the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The International Red Cross Movement
developed out of national Red Cross societies, numbering some 144 by
1988.
The 1864 treaty was revised in 1906. In 1929 a new treaty protecting
prisoners of war was developed. In 1949 four additional treaties were
created governing wounded and sick combatants, prisoners of war,
civilians and internal wars. These were reaffirmed and supplemented in
1977. The Hague conventions of 1899 established an additional set of
rules governing war. (Examine the documents themselves)
Such international conventions opened sensational reporting
opportunities for correspondents who witnessed atrocities. Barbarities
now were not only a violation of a Christian sense of natural
"progress" but also a violation of international law. If a government
had agreed to a convention, it could be humiliated by evidence of
violation. Moral outrage could be both very sincere and very helpful in
selling newspapers. War correspondent James Creelman's
reporting on Japanese atrocities at Port Arthur in 1894 is a classic
example.
Modern day "laws of war" born of Victorian Christianity break
drastically with deep centuries old traditions of medieval and tribal
warfare. Going back to biblical times it was natural for "victors" to
enjoy the spoils: to seal the humiliation of their defeated male
enemies by enslaving, raping, or murdering women and children.
The ethos born of Victorianism raised women and children onto a
pedestal as innocents to be protected in war. Such innocents should be
spared, no matter what barbarities men must endure, .
The practices of pre-Victorian warfare have survived and repeatedly
reappeared in modern times -- as in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990's
where mass rape of women was deliberately used to humiliate male
opponents as part of "ethnic cleansing."
Modern technology has also made the laws of war impossible to fully
implement. World War II saw massive aerial bombardment, including
nuclear bombs, once again make women and children vulnerable to mass
killing. The development of highly accurate smart missiles and bombs
has more recently made it easier to "spare the innocent."
JAMES CREELMAN:
YELLOW WATCHDOG
The tie between early American human rights
reporting and America's outward expansion is illustrated in the career
of James
Creelman (1859 to 1915), a Canadian-born correspondent for
the Pulitzer and Hearst chains whose career stretched from reporting
the aftermath of Custer's Last Stand to World War I. Creelman's
reporting in Asia and Latin America demonstrated how a foreign
correspondent acting as a "watchdog" could embarrass foreign
governments, moderate their future behavior, as well as justify the
expansion of American military power and colonial rule in the name of
"progress" and "civilization."
Creelman's exposee of Japanese
massacres of Chinese civilians in the Manchurian city of
Port Arthur during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5 allowed Joseph
Pulitzer's flagship the New York World to scoop the European
competition and spotlight Japan's apparent failure to obey the rules of
civilized warfare as set forth in the Geneva Convention of 1864 to
which the modernizers who ruled Japan since the 1860's had subscribed.
Japan's government ordered an investigation and by cable "apologized"
to Joseph Pulitzer, who gained the proud satisfaction of having the
apology run on page 1 of the World. Seven years later Japan made extra
certain its troops would refrain from atrocities and looting when
putting down (along with more rapacious European and American armies)
the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion of 1900.16)
Creelman had earned such a reputation at Port Arthur that
Joseph Pulitzer sent him to Cuba in 1896 to investigate and publicize
the harsh repression of Cuban insurgents under Spanish General
Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau. Spanish authorities expelled Creelman and
charged he had falsely reported starvations, executions and other
hardships resulting from Weyler's policy of segregating civilians into
guarded enclaves to prevent guerrillas from gaining popular support.
Creelman's reports fueled American indignation at what was seen as a
brutal and medieval Spanish policy, indignation which made it easier
for American "hawks" to push a reluctant President McKinley into war
with Spain after the U.S. battleship Maine was blown up in Havana
harbor on February 15, 1898. Creelman's reporting thus had the on-team
effect of justifying the American war with Spain, which opened the way
for American colonies in Cuba and the Philippines.
American newspapers had long covered Latin American efforts to throw
out foreign rule - whether it was the Mexican rebellion that led to a
firing squad in 1867 for the French installed Emperor Maximillian or
the "Ten Years War" Cuban rebellion against Spanish rule beginning in
1868.
Growing American commercial interests, the need for a secure
trans-Panama portage and later canal to the Pacific (constructed 1904
to 1914), and the legacy of the Monroe Doctrine which opposed European
intervention and colonization in the Americas made it natural that
efforts to increase American influence to the South could be justified
in terms of supporting liberation against European colonialism. It was
natural an American journalist could thus appear both patriotic and
progressive by spotlighting the abuses of European colonial rule.
WOODROW WILSON:
A RISING BANNER FALLS
The ingrained American commitment to independence
and anti-imperialism was echoed in President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen
Points, announced to Congress in 1918 as a foundation for post World
War I peace. Although these points, only partly enshrined in the Treaty
of Versailles, principally concerned open diplomacy and the peaceful
resolution of disputes, they provided for the redrawing of Italian
frontiers and the division of Austria-Hungarian empire according to
nationality lines.
Wilson's goal to guarantee rights of national self-determination for
the ethnic groups which made up the old Austro-Hungarian empire was
built into the postwar treaties of Versailles, Trianon, and
Saint-Germain on the assumption discontent League of Nations which grew
out of Versailles former colonial powers governed Mandated Territories
with the theoretical obligation to guarantee peoples of these
territories rights of national independence and well-being. Another
major step separate from the League was the 1926 convention outlawing
slavery spearheaded by a coalition of non governmental organizations
constituting the Anti-Slavery League.17)
The United States refused to join the League and retreated
into isolationism. Still, sympathy and some news coverage developed as
newly independent countries such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary sought
to establish Western style democracy and human rights after World War
I. Yet for the most part the isolationism and economic depression of
the 1920's and 1930's dulled public and media interest in the rise of
fascism and Nazism. The American media played relatively little
attention to the human rights issues which accompanied the failure of
democratic self-determination in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the
Balkans.18)
It was not until after World War II that the number of
refugees - this time from communist rule in Eastern European countries
such as Poland - became a large audience with whom politicians and news
media could boost their standing by stressing human rights repression
in "captive nations." This coverage was "on-team" it that it tended to
build public support for expanding America's political and military
power around the world to "contain" a communist Soviet Union.
Although the flow of refugees was limited, American newspapers and
journals of opinion had covered - or at least noted - the scattered
repressions which cut through Europe in the last half of the nineteenth
century. The ultimately unsuccessful republican revolutions which
spread through France, Italy, and Austria-Hungary in 1848 had some
"newsworthiness" for Americans - since they suggested that these
European countries might be abandoning autocratic monarchies to follow
the American "example" with its emphasis on individual liberties and
rights.19)
WORLD WAR I: AN
ENDING TO BELIEF
Early human rights reporting paid little or no
attention to issues of credibility. There was no real awareness of an
issue which is second nature today: what one person sees as human
rights reporting can be seen by another as propaganda. Indeed
propagandists can fabricate or exaggerate abuses - or even emotionally
exploit basically accurate accounts to manipulate public opinion and
governments for their own ends.
It was not until after World War I that these pitfalls became apparent.
In the disillusionment which followed the heady patriotism of 1914 to
1918 it became clear that both Allied and German governments had
consciously and systematically spread false reports of rape, looting,
and murder. Reporters and editors had willingly followed their
governments' lead and published virtually any accusation without
checking for credibility and balance. In time of war skepticism seemed
tantamount to disloyalty or even treason.20)
It had seemed necessary for governments to "demonize" their
enemies as the epitome of absolute evil. How else could a government
justify the loss of hundred of thousands of lives in unending trench
warfare often for only a few hundred yards of territory? One of the
most flagrant examples was a British report under the chair of Lord
Bryce alleging German soldiers had publicly raped twenty Belgian girls
in Liege, bayoneted a two year old child and sliced off a peasant
girl's breasts in Malines.
After the war it emerged the committee had not interviewed a single
witness and that hearsay evidence was accepted at full value. A Belgian
commission in 1922 failed to corroborate any major allegation in the
Bryce Report. The "demonizing" of Germany served to build public
support and helped make it possible for President Woodrow Wilson to
reverse his opposition to war and lead the United States into a rescue
effort on behalf of the Allies.21)
After the War, revisionist historians questioned the
accuracy of wartime atrocity charges. The pacifist sentiment of "never
again" grew and so did the mood of "never let the propagandists dupe us
again." Editors and reporters who during the War might have run charges
of cruelty and massacre without question were now more skeptical. What
and how many were the sources? How credible were they? And could they
be independently verified were now questions that professional
journalists could be expected to ask.
In short, if journalists were to be truly professional, the
"gatekeeper" who controlled access to news space would have to restrain
the desire for sensationalism in favor of carefully filtering out
reports which seemed excessive, exaggerated, from sources inherently
biased. Indeed any person, group, or refugee who claimed to be a victim
might be acting out of a desire to manipulate the press for propaganda
reasons.
Thus by the 1930's the World War I practice of "the bigger the
accusation the better" had become, "the bigger the accusation the more
caution is needed before printing" - especially if there were no
independent eyewitness to verify an accusation picked up from refugee
or political opposition sources.
The exaggerations of World War I thus became one seed for perhaps the
most conspicuous failure of human rights reporting in modern times. The
demonizing of World War I led - with some important exceptions - to
widespread complacent tardiness in assessing and reporting on the
brutalities of both communist and fascist totalitarianism beginning in
the 1930's.22)
If an accusation concerning Hitler's Germany or Stalin's
Russia were really massive, might it not simply be overblown propaganda
obviously designed to benefit ideological opponents of these regimes -
especially since such accusations most often came from enemies of these
governments? Could refugees really be trusted?
After all, correspondents attached long-term to these countries for the
most part did not report such abuses - or did so very cautiously.
Surely they would not "pull punches" simply to stay on good terms with
local officials? If such massive abuses were real, wouldn't our own
government and diplomats confirm them? And if we must be skeptical when
massive, brutal abuses are charged, what about the smaller, more
qualified charges? How much space can we give them without blowing them
out of proportion, playing into the hands of propagandists, and
neglecting the more positive things also happening in countries such as
Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union?
In short World War I helped bring a decline of human rights reporting
at exactly the time it was most needed. The Great War had demonstrated
the danger of giving in to propaganda, but had set in place no strong
procedures or organizations (either private or governmental) to help
preserve human rights reporting as an effective and responsible way of
alerting governments and peoples to overseas violations of what were
coming to be seen as civilized norms.
So it was not until the aftermath of World War II etched memories of
genocide and massacre in the collective minds of the victors that major
efforts were made to encourage governments, private organizations, and
the press to spotlight human rights violations in a timely fashion.
WORLD WAR II:
MOTHER OF RIGHTS REPORTING
If World War I led to a skepticism toward human
rights reporting, World War II led to the exact opposite. The war
against what was seen as aggression by a totalitarian Axis - plus the
coming Cold War to contain totalitarian communism - led to a revival of
the Wilsonian thinking that governments repressive toward their own
people were more likely to threaten aggression than democratic
governments which honor human rights. The postwar order sought to set
up early warning trip wires against both military aggression and
violation of human rights.23)
By 1948 the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the
United States had ended hopes that cooperation between the great powers
on the United Nations Security Council could police the world against
military aggression. Still the development of international human
rights conventions under the auspices of the United Nations codified
the concept of international human rights and provided a measuring
stick by which governments could be judged.
The Geneva conventions governing the conduct of war among states, as
first established in the 1864, were in effect extended to cover the
conduct of governments toward their own citizens, thus implying that
violation of human rights within any country was now subject to
international regulation - not simply a matter of national sovereignty.
Although there were few provisions for enforcement, any state which
violated a human rights convention it subscribed to could be seen as
having violated international law.
The United Nations Charter of 1945 contained few references to human
rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N.
General Assembly in 1948 helped fill the gap by providing some 30
articles affirming a variety of rights. This defined more specifically
Article 55 of the Charter which had in general terms endorsed "equal
rights and self determination of peoples" and "human rights and
fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex,
language, or religion.
The Universal Declaration was recommendation, not binding law. The
rights endorsed were sweeping: equality before the law regardless of
race, color, sex and language; no arbitrary arrest, detention, or
exile; no torture or cruel, inhuman punishment; freedom of movement;
fair trial; governments based on genuine elections by universal and
equal suffrage; an adequate standard of living; right to education;
right to work and free choice of employment; freedom of opinion and
expression; freedom of thought and religion; the right to form and join
trade unions; and the right to marry and have a family, among others.24)
After nearly two decades of negotiation U.N. efforts
produced two additional human rights treaties: the International
Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966) and the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966). By 1988 90
states had ratified the first and 86 the second. The documents are
considered legally binding for nations which have ratified them. There
are procedures for petition and action.25)
These post World War II international conventions thus
enshrined many of the familiar rights contained in the American Bill of
Rights. They went beyond that to include social and economic rights of
the kind often emphasized by communism and other authoritarianism as
preeminent and sometimes requiring restrictions on political freedom.
Thus conflicting governments could cite different provisions of human
rights conventions to justify their policies and criticize the actions
of other nations. For example, a Soviet spokesman could declare in
1975, "The question of guaranteeing individual rights is of secondary
importance as compared with social and economic consequences of
scientific and technological progress for society in general."26)
The legacy of World War II was thus:
1) An international mind set sensitive to massive
human rights violations as reminiscent of Axis practices seen as both
savage and leading to aggression. This mind set, as absorbed by both
media workers and consumers, made it more likely charges of human
rights violations would be perceived as "news."
2) A set of international standards which could be invoked by human
rights advocates, as well as by government propagandists, in speeches,
government proclamations and United Nations debates. Charges of
repression and atrocity could be couched in terms of legal violations,
a familiar language for news media accustomed to following politics,
law and government. The very existence of a legal charge can be seen as
"news."27)
3) A set of international organizations where charges of
human rights abuses could be filed, debated, and hence be covered as
news. Even though countries might rarely agree on concerted
international sanctions, complaints brought by governments and
sometimes by individuals could focus media attention and public
pressure on suspected offenders.28)
4) A "Cold War" struggle between noncommunist countries
which stressed human rights involving political liberties and communist
countries which frequently justified their policies on human rights to
social and economic welfare.
COLD WAR: EXPOSING
TYRANNY AS PATRIOTIC
As the Cold War began, the mind set and legal
framework had thus been established for a higher profile for human
rights issues in the public mind, in political debate and in the
language governments used to defend their foreign policies. The way was
open for domestic political parties such as the Democrats and
Republicans to use human rights issues in bids for elections. Any
nation - whether it be Western free enterprise, communist, or third
world socialist - could use the language of human rights to defend its
own policies while attacking its opponents Human rights was in the news!
The aftermath of World War II virtually guaranteed a higher media
profile for human rights issues. Memories of the holocaust and numerous
other massacres against civilians and prisoners of war hung like a
ghost over postwar planners with visions of "never again!"
True, hopes for a collective security imposed by great powers
cooperating at the United Nations Security Council gave way to Cold War
between the Soviet Union and the United States. But even that new
conflict elevated human rights into a major ideological, political,
legal, and media concern.
Both sides in the Cold War and a Cold War frequently fought out a
propaganda battle over human rights. Indeed the description of the Cold
War as a contest between the "Free World" and the communist World
indicated just how highly a kind of human rights lens had come to
dominate the American world view.
The Truman Administration could rally Americans behind the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by pointing to harsh crackdowns on
political and cultural freedoms orchestrated by communist governments
installed in Central Europe by Soviet occupation forces. The successful
Republican challenge to capture the White House in 1952 could cite the
human rights plight of "captive nations" to charge Democrats had
allowed communism to spread by being too soft on communism in World War
II agreements between Roosevelt and Stalin.
The American self-image as protector of the world's human rights
against an expansive tyrant received powerful reinforcement when Soviet
tanks crushed Hungarian "freedom fighters" in 1956. Erection of the
Berlin Wall in 1961 to prevent the escape of East German refugees
strengthened this perception.
Thus media coverage of communist repression could justify the expansion
of American political, military, and economic power to contain
communism. U.S. government pronouncements, the testimony of
anticommunist refugees, the anti-communism of expert sources in the
academic world, and the dispatches of correspondents based in communist
countries reinforced an "on-team" message.
The investigations into alleged communist infiltration of government,
universities, the entertainment industry, as conducted by Senator
Joseph R. McCarthy and others, enforced an atmosphere of anticommunist
conformity and reduced the likelihood of media reporting which might
embarrass the U.S. government by pointing to human rights abuses by
overseas American allies. On-team exposure of human rights abuses by
communist governments was less likely to embarrass or anger the
American government and American readers.
By the 1950's and 1960's it was almost a badge of honor and a promise
of professional advancement for a correspondent to be expelled from the
Soviet Union. It was a far cry from the 1930's when some correspondents
based in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union appeared to "pull their
punches" to curry favor and gain access to news from their hosts, as
well as to avoid the expense and embarrassment of expulsion.29)
The Vietnam War changed all this.
THE VIETNAM WAR:
GOOD GUYS INTO BAD
The failed U.S. attempt to preserve a noncommunist
South Vietnam encouraged a wave of skepticism at home and a lingering
suspicion that American policies - not just the actions of a repressive
enemy - might threaten human rights. The image of America as a global
protector of human rights came under challenge from another image: an
arrogant bully battling a Third World underdog, burning villages, and
bombing civilians in rice paddies.
A growing sense of mea culpa found its way into a media covering an
increasingly outspoken and disillusioned opposition, including campus
demonstrators, academics, and members of congress.
As opposition to an unending war grew, an audience also grew for
journalism to cover the words and actions of those poking holes in
American military and political claims. "Off-team" dissent, sit-ins,
Congressional debates, and youthful "counterculture" alienation
culminating in police beatings of antiwar demonstrators at the 1968
Democratic presidential convention in Chicago all encouraged a more
skeptical look by the press - even though vast amounts of reporting
still reflected administration viewpoints as much as antiwar
disillusionment.
Television news film showing burning Vietnamese villages raised
questions about both the morality and winnability of the war. Accounts
of American atrocities filtered into the mainstream U.S. media at about
the same time coverage of North Vietnam's Tet Offensive undermined the
Johnson Administration's confident pronouncements by giving the
impression communists were were scoring military victories.30)
Lack of U.S. military censorship, the ability of American
correspondents to travel widely in Vietnam and interview American
soldiers who challenged the optimistic pronouncements at official U.S.
briefings opened the way for coverage increasingly different from the
official line. This high degree of "access" allowed both television and
print reporters to transmit images of burning villages and civilian
suffering so frequent in military pacification campaigns against
guerrilla insurgents. The messy nature of guerrilla war with its
inherent difficulties in distinguishing between civilians and
combatants and the pressures to relocate or otherwise retaliate against
civilians seen as supporting the enemy undermined any simple moral
image of "good guys against bad."
This new, more complicated image shattered the simpler moral
assumptions of both World War II and Korea. Reporters in those earlier
wars for the most part did not write about American atrocities. These
earlier reporters were subject to censorship, but even without that
their identification with the war effort and with the soldiers fighting
it inclined toward "supportive" coverage that could rally patriotic
news consumers on the home front.
Reporters in those wars were less likely to dwell on the sufferings of
civilians - even though the Allies had adopted a strategy of "total
war" aimed at defeating the Axis by massive bombing of civilians in
cities like Berlin, Dresden, and Tokyo. High civilian casualties were
largely accepted - either as an inevitable part of winning a war or as
justified given similar tactics already used by a brutal enemy.31)
AMERICAN
SPONSORED TERROR?
In the aftermath of Vietnam, critics of American policies
exposed instances in which U.S. government agencies supported violence
which would be seen as terror if conducted by other nations. Activists
and scholars pushed for release of secret government documents which
might expose such actions - or even portray some Americans as war
criminals.
Those who championed such causes frequently, but not always, were of
the "Liberal/Left." They often combined human rights advocacy with
criticism of America's Cold War anti-Communist policies.
According to The National Security Archive at George Washington
University, an instructional
guide on assassination was among the training files of the
CIA's covert "Operation PBSUCCESS" released by the Agency on May 23,
1997. The records concerned CIA involvement in a 1954 coup against the
nationalistic left leaning Arbenz government in Guatemala.
According to the Archive, the CIA finally declassified some 1400 pages
of over 100,000 estimated to be in its secret archives on the
Guatemalan destabilization program, after years of answering Freedom of
Information Act requests with its standard "we can neither confirm nor
deny that such records exist."
More recently Daniel
Jonah Goldhagen and Samantha Power called for a full
congressional investigation into reports that former Senator Bob Kerrey
committed war crimes by executing women and children during a February
1969 Navy SEAL commando raid at the South Vietnamese village of Thanh
Phong. They argued the United States should use the same standards of
international law on the conduct of its own combatants as it would on
other military forces.
THE CASE OF HENRY
KISSINGER
Perhaps the most
controversial American target of charges of human rights violations is
Henry A. Kissinger, the German Jewish born Harvard University professor
who became National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under
President Richard Nixon.
Admirers (a Nobel
Prize award in 1973 honored
Kissinger for a Vietnam peace agreement) hail this historian of
diplomatic "realpolitik" for brilliance in helping to build a bridge
with China while promoting détente with the Soviet Union, and
withdrawing American forces from Vietnam.
But critics have "elevated" Kissinger into
America's number one defendant against charges of human rights abuse.
Some hold him directly or indirectly responsible for mass killings in
Cambodia after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Critics also hold
Kissinger at least partly responsible for the reign of terror that
followed the CIA encouraged overthrow of Chile's elected President
Salvador Allende Gossens in 1973. See William Shawcross
Sideshow on Kissinger and Cambodia and Christopher Hitchens Kissinger
on
Trial on Chile.
On May 28, 2001, French judge Roger
Le
Loire formally asked former U.S. secretary of state Henry
Kissinger to appear as a witness in an ongoing investigation of the
disappearance of five French citizens during the 1973 to 1990 regime of
former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Kissinger, who was in
Paris on a private visit, received the summons at his hotel but
declined to appear and traveled to Italy.
Judge Le Loire was investigating the disappearances of the French
leftist Jean-Yves Claudet-Fernández; activist Alphonse
Chanfreau; Etienne Pesle, a priest; and Georges Klein, an adviser to
Chilean President Salvador Allende Gossens.
While there was no charge Kissinger was responsible for the
disappearances, William Bourdon, a lawyer for the families of the
disappeared, had asked for Kissinger's testimony:
"A whole series of factors shows that the U.S. government watched very
closely what was happening in Chile, especially the situation of
foreigners who had disappeared, and therefore also the French," Bourdon
told Agence France Presse. "Beyond the symbol that he represents,
Kissinger is a person who can contribute to the clarification of the
truth through his answers."
HUMAN RIGHTS AS
AMERICA'S POLITICAL PIVOT
The aftermath of Vietnam left American politics and
public opinion deeply divided over what "lesson" to learn from the war.
Advocates in this debate often fought their battles over controversies
involving human rights. The result: editors and reporters were more
likely to recognize as "news" overseas developments involving human
rights issues. This division over Vietnam's "lessons" - epitomized in
the shifting foreign policies of the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan
Administrations - laid the foundations for a surge in American "human
rights" reporting in the 1970's, 1980's, and right up into the 1990's.
By the early 1970's liberals and some conservatives had adopted human
rights arguments for "off-team" criticism of the Nixon Administration.
They denounced the U.S. government from different directions for
"selling out" on the moral justification for global American power.
The "Left" criticized the Nixon Administration for involvement in the
overthrow of Chile's left-leaning President Salvador Allende by the
repressive General Augusto Pinochet. They attacked American toleration
of the "disappearance" and killing of thousands of Allende supporters
as major insensitivity to human rights.
The "Right" used human rights issues to attack the Nixon-Kissinger team
for its policy of détente toward the Soviet Union despite
Moscow's repressive human rights policies including restrictions on
Jewish emigration More ideologically minded conservatives were not
comfortable with the Administration's real politick approach of
selectively doing business with China and the Soviet Union in hopes of
achieving a balance of power by playing off these competing communist
powers against each other. One bipartisan human rights measure passed
by Congress was the Jackson-Vanik amendment which denied Most Favored
Nation status to communist countries denying reasonable emigration.
The administration of President Jimmy Carter raised promotion of human
rights overseas into a central objective of American foreign policy.
Standing for human rights was both morally correct and likely to
increase American influence by attracting support and admiration, it
was argued.
The Carter Administration extended the ethos of America's domestic
civil rights movement into foreign policy. Former civil rights
campaigner Pat Derian became the first head of the State Department's
newly established Office of Human Rights. That office was charged with
issuing an annual country by country evaluation of the world's human
rights situation, a report to be taken into account in the allocation
of American foreign aid.
Even before the Carter presidency, Congressional legislation aimed at
what was seen as the human rights blindness of President Nixon's
imperial presidency began to influence U.S. foreign policy. Legislation
sometimes attached human rights requirements on issues such as the
granting of foreign aid and trade concessions to both communist and
noncommunist countries.
Those who viewed America's Vietnam failure as the result of support for
an authoritarian South Vietnamese government were specially likely to
raise human rights objections to U.S. backing of other repressive
anticommunist governments. Arguments over human rights were thus
sometimes a test of what post-Vietnam policy should be.
WILL THE REAL
HYPOCRITES PLEASE STAND UP?
As both liberals and conservative began to adopt
human rights slogans to advocate very different policies and embrace or
reject very different governments, a new charge in the lexicon of
political infighting emerged: "hypocrisy" and "double standard" on
issues of human rights." If conservatives were so concerned about
imprisoned dissidents in the Soviet Union, why did they look the other
way at "disappearances" in Chile - not to mention hangings and police
brutality against blacks in South Africa? If liberals were so concerned
about pushing for an embargo against South Africa, why did they favor
easing of trade restrictions against Cuba?
Thus in the late 1970's Carter's critics attacked him for downplaying
communist human rights abuses as his administration prodded friends of
America such as Chile toward human rights improvements. Reagan's
critics in the 1980's could criticize him for attacking communist
abuses while looking the other way from human rights violations by an
anticommunist government in El Salvador and by anticommunist Contra
rebels in Nicaragua.
The nature of these political debates served to increase the demand for
coverage of overseas stories from a human rights perspective. A foreign
news story couched around a human rights angle could be of interest to
anyone following the home political debate. If carried in reputable
media, politicians could seize on an emotionally compelling story to
press their charge of hypocrisy toward any politician who appeared too
tolerant of a particular strain of human rights offender.
Any media which broke a major human rights story with politically
sensitive implications could find a willing audience and potentially
wield power by providing information that gave one group or another
political leverage in congressional debates and elsewhere.
THE COLD WAR
ENDS: IN SEARCH OF A MISSION
The Vietnam War opened the way for a battle over
America's future foreign policy often fought out in the language of
human rights. The end of the Cold War guaranteed a new stage in the
place of human rights issues in American thinking and politics. Just as
the disintegration of Soviet communism opened the way for fresh debate
on American foreign policy, it also opened the way for a new stage in
how American editors and reporters cover human rights issues around the
world.
The great consciousness of human rights issues ushered in by World War
II and the Vietnam War seemed destined to linger. Newsday's
graphic August 2, 1992 reporting on atrocities in Serb-run camps in
former Yugoslavia once again demonstrated how quickly an "American
angle" can turn overseas human rights issues into an "American story"
and an American debate. The continued domestic impact of human rights
reporting from overseas became clear when presidential candidate Bill
Clinton called for for possible air strikes on Serbian forces and
criticized President Bush for being too passive.
Reporting on human rights abuses overseas might be selective and
sporadic. Editors might continue to look for clear "American angles,"
dramatic images of sympathetic victims, and tales of victimization with
which the "average" American reader or viewer could identify. Debate
over just what constituted a human right abuse might continue in times
of flux when the identity of America's friends and enemies remained
uncertain.
In the swirl of civil wars, famines, and political persecutions -
amidst the high speed transmission of television images and printed
"exclusives" - it seems most likely that reporting from overseas on
abuses which appear to violate American values will continue to impact
American life. The debate continually reemerges over what is often seen
as America's moral mission in the world. In one shape or another human
rights reporting from overseas constantly reappears as one set of eyes
tugging at the hearts and minds of those who debate and act.
