The Bushwhacking of human rights

Aryeh Neier, Project Syndicate

If you judge a government on the basis of its good intentions, those who support an American foreign policy that emphasizes the promotion of human rights internationally should cheer President George W. Bush's reelection. Indeed, no U.S. president has spoken out more frequently and more forcefully about America's mission to promote freedom in the world.

The National Security Strategy of the United States, published by the Bush administration in September 2002, is filled with strongly worded commitments to promote human rights. The Country Reports on Human Rights worldwide, published annually by the State Department, maintain the high standard of accuracy and comprehensiveness that they achieved during the Clinton administration. Under President Bush, the U.S. has taken robust stands on human rights conditions not only in pariah countries such as Burma, Cuba, and Syria, but also in strategically important countries like Egypt, Uzbekistan, and China.

Yet those who examine the impact of the Bush administration on human rights practices internationally often argue that Bush's reelection will do long-lasting -- perhaps irreversible -- damage to the human rights cause. What explains this apparent contradiction?

There are three principal reasons why the Bush administration's impact on human rights is so much at odds with its stated intentions. Iraq comes first. After official U.S. claims about weapons of mass destruction and about a connection to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, became untenable, Bush increasingly emphasized the argument that America's invasion was justified to remove a tyrant, Saddam Hussein, and thus to free the Iraqi people. In essence, this is an argument that the war was justified as a means of promoting human rights.

To those in the other Arab countries of the Middle East and elsewhere who oppose the war, the impact is to make human rights seem a justification, or a pretext, for a projection of American power. The effect is to increase their distrust of those who preach about human rights, making it much more difficult than ever before for the U.S. to rally support for human rights in much of the world.

The second reason that Bush's reelection is likely to hurt the human rights cause is that it constitutes an endorsement by the majority of Americans of an administration that is responsible for grave human rights abuses. America's moral authority as an advocate of human rights depends on its own respect for human rights. Under President Bush, that authority has largely evaporated.

The twin symbols are Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Having practiced long-term detentions without charge, trial, or access to family or counsel; having sexually humiliated and tortured prisoners, some of them to death; and having failed to hold accountable any of the high-level officials responsible for the policies that led to those crimes, the U.S. is now seen as a hypocrite when it calls on other governments not to engage in such abuses.

While the war in Iraq and abuses at American detention centers have damaged the cause of human rights in the Middle East and Asia, the third factor in the weakening of human rights -- unregulated free trade -- has been felt mostly in Latin America. It is there that the Bush administration has most vigorously asserted its position that the freedom of capital movement is an aspect of human rights. In the National Security Strategy of September 2002, the Bush administration calls free trade not only a meritorious policy, but also a "moral principle."

Many Latin Americans have lost faith in democracy because it has not benefited them economically. They see the U.S. as simultaneously the champion of democracy in the region and as the culprit in their economic woes because of its insistence on the sanctity of capital. When protecting capital is elevated to a moral principle, or justified as a component of human rights in a region resentful over its sense of economic subjugation, the effect is to foster disillusion with human rights.

President Bush and many of his associates may be sincere in their commitment to the human rights cause. But perhaps it is such certainty in their good intentions that makes them blind to the damage that they are doing.

The writer, the president of the Open Society Institute and a founder of Human Rights Watch, is the author of Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights.