On Friday, the morning after the Democratic debate, I was stunned to
read in the War Room column over in Salon that Governor Bill
Richardson had said the wrong thing about national security versus
human rights. Tim Grieve wrote, "We're not sure which office Richardson
is seeking these days, but he came pretty close to disqualifying
himself from either of them last night when he insisted that human
rights are more important than America's national security." I'm not
sure what planet Tim Grieve is living on, but on our planet, it is
human rights that are precious and rare and always to be preserved and
"national security" that is ever and anon a cant boondoggle. I was not
alone in my dismay. I read War Room almost everyday and have liked
Grieve's posts in the past. When I first read what he was saying, I
thought he was joking; so did other readers. The entry got 57
responses. Almost all of them were outraged, and several called on Tim
to explain himself. He never did.
Human rights are defined, most notably in the U.S. Bill of Rights. They
are defined because the Founding Fathers realized that if they were
not defined, they would be more likely to be abrogated or lost
entirely. The Founding Fathers understood the temptation on the part
of governments to give and remove human rights arbitrarily, because
they had experienced such things before the Revolutionary War -- in the
Stamp Act, in the quartering of British soldiers on American
households, and in illegal searches and seizures, in no taxation
without representation. They recognized that although British Law
customarily acknowledged various human rights, it was essential to
name, codify, and write them down to make it less likely that they
could be taken away.
Human rights are profoundly local -- they reside in individuals.
According to humans rights theory, if someone is human, he or she has
the same rights as every other human. The rights of American citizens
as described in the Bill of Rights have been expanded and extrapolated
around the world so that they apply not only to us but to everyone.
While in the U.S. this idea is a bit controversial, in other countries
it is standard, accepted, and cherished. The codification of human
rights, and the widespread acknowledgment of this, is one of the
things that makes the modern world modern. To roll back human rights,
even for some individuals, is to return to a more primitive,
hierarchical, and un-American theory of human relations. One example,
of course, concerns women. Can women routinely be imprisoned, sold,
mutilated, or killed by their relatives? U.S. law says they cannot; in
practice, many are, but no one openly promotes what many secretly do.
If a candidate, even a Republican, ran on a platform of reducing the
legal rights of women, he wouldn't get far (ask me again in 10 years,
though). Or consider lynching. The U.S. has a long tradition of
lynching. It was only after the Second World War that the Federal
Government and state governments began enforcing their own
anti-lynching laws. This was a victory for human rights. Do you want
to go back? The Republicans would like you to, in the name of: "national security."
Guess what? There is no such thing as "national security"; it's a
concept that not only hasn't been defined, it can't be defined. It is
a psychological state. The very phrase describes an impossibility. All
boundaries in the U.S. and in every other country are porous. Planes
come and go, as do ships, trains, trucks, autos, information
superhighways, human relationships, and human emotions. In addition,
the smaller any threat becomes, the less safe we are against it. We no
longer live in the world of Mutually Assured Destruction, where our
thousands of warheads aimed at the Russians protected us,
psychologically, from their thousands of warheads aimed at us. Since
the end of the Cold War, threats have gotten smaller and more
invisible. Where is that suitcase of nuclear material? Where is that
vial of anthrax? But as they have gotten less easily detected, they
have also gotten more local. 9/11 is what we always think of when we
think of a breach of national security, but in fact, the destruction
was not national, or even city-wide, or even district wide -- although
the World Trade Center was less than a mile from the New York Stock
Exchange, the NYSE was only closed for six days after 9/11.
The phrase "national security" cannot mean anything in a nation of
almost 10 million square miles. The Bush administration and the
corporatocracy knows this perfectly well. Witness how our chemical
plants have not been secured from the possibility of terrorist
attack -- there are too many of them, and the likelihood of any one
getting attacked is too small to make it worthwhile for either the
nation or the chemical industry to fortify them. The Dubai Ports deal
of a couple of years ago demonstrated the same understanding on the
part of the administration, that "national security" is merely
rallying cry for fear.
The Bush administration has spent some trillions of dollars (I shrink
from naming a figure, since, as big as it is, it is surely a lie) to
attack a nation of a mere 437,000 square miles. In doing so, they have
chosen to ignore such items of U.S. national security as public health
and infrastructure maintenance. The population of the U.S. is
demonstrably poorer, hungrier, less healthy, more homeless, more
likely to be injured in an infrastructure failure, and more likely to
suffer from a weather related loss than it was before the Bush administration came into office. A huge debt means that the economy is
more likely to fail. The prospects of our children for a peaceful and
prosperous future are worse. Nothing that the Bush administration or
the Republicans or the Military Industrial Complex has done in the
last seven years of foolish incompetence and braggadoccio has
benefited the nation as a whole, though it has benefited a small class
of investors and government cronies. As a result of the Iraq War and
the Bush attack on the Constitution, I can be afraid of the
obliteration of the entire idea of the U.S. -- I am afraid of that, thanks
to the tyrannies of the Bush administration and the professions of the
current crop of Republican candidates -- but not of the obliteration of
the U.S. itself. Indeed, the war in Iraq shows more than one thing about
the idea of national security, because even though the Iraqis have
been attacked by the largest military in the world, they have been
damaged but not subdued. The same would be true of the U.S., no matter
who attacked us.
Liberals, progressives, and Democrats recognize, at least
intuitively, that "national security" is a code word for tribalism,
while "human rights" is a code word for the rule of law. Governor
Richardson was straightforward in acknowledging this fact, and
deserves praise rather than blame, especially from a writer for Salon.