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Wednesday, Jan 26, 2005

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Where Bush can tackle tyranny

By Gary Younge

If George W. Bush wanted to tackle tyranny, he could start with regimes under U.S. control. But liberty clearly has limits.

THERE IS one tiny corner of Cuba that will forever America be. It is a place where innocent people are held without charge for years, beyond international law, human decency and the mythical glow of Lady Liberty's torch. It is a place where torture is common, beating is ritual and humiliation is routine. They call it Guantanamo Bay.

Last week the new United States Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, listed Cuba, among others, as "an outpost of tyranny." A few days later President Bush started his second term with a pledge to unleash "the force of freedom" on the entire world. "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world," he said.

You would think that if the Americans are truly interested in expanding freedom and ending tyranny in Cuba, let alone the rest of the world, Guantanamo Bay would be as good a place to start as any. But Ms. Rice was not referring to the outpost of tyranny that her boss created in Cuba, but the rest of the Caribbean island, which lives in a stable mixture of the imperfect and the impressive.

In short, while the U.S. could liberate a place where there are flagrant human rights abuses and over which it has total control, it would rather topple a sovereign state, which poses no threat, through diplomatic and economic — and possibly military — warfare that is already causing chaos and hardship.

Welcome to Mr. Bush's foreign policy strategy for the second term. His aim is to try and realign the rest of the world so that it is more in keeping with the values that govern Guantanamo, where human rights and legal norms are subordinated to America's perceived interests.

Under this philosophy, the Bush administration understands the words "tyranny" and "freedom" in much the same way as it understands international law. They mean whatever the White House wants them to mean.

Take Uzbekistan, one of the most repressive regimes in central Asia. In April 2002, a special U.N. rapporteur concluded that torture in the country was "systematic" and "pervasive and persistent... throughout the investigation process." In 2003, Mr. Bush granted a waiver to Uzbekistan when its failure to improve its human rights record should have led to its aid being slashed. In February 2004 the U.S. Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, visited the country's dictator, Islam Karimov, and said: "The relationship [between our countries] is strong and growing stronger. We look forward to strengthening our political and economic relations."

Yet the U.S. continues to shower the country with aid, docking a mere $18 million last year (around 20 per cent of the total) after expressing its "disappointment" that Mr. Karimov had not made greater strides towards democracy. Pan down the shopping list of tyrannical states in Ms. Rice's in-tray (Iran, Burma, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Belarus and Cuba) and you will find no mention of Uzbekistan. Why? Because Uzbekistan, with an estimated 10,000 political prisoners, hosts a U.S. military base that offers easy access to Afghanistan and the rest of the region.

The point here is not that the U.S. should intervene in more places, but that it should intervene consistently and honestly or not at all.

Mr. Bush's inauguration speech was packed with truisms, axioms, platitudes and principles that appear reasonable at first glance. The trouble is they are contradicted by the reality he has created and continues to support.

As he delivered his address, you could almost whisper the caveats. "America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains [apart from in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay], or that women welcome humiliation and servitude [apart from in Saudi Arabia] or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies [apart from Uzbekistan and Israel]."

The damage that this selective notion of liberty inflicts on the rest of the world should by now be pretty clear. According to the independent website Iraqbodycount.net, reported civilian deaths in Iraq have already reached between 15,365 and 17,582 since the war started, while the recent study for the Lancet estimated the death toll at 100,000 at least, and probably higher. Next weekend's elections in Iraq — which take place in the midst of a war against foreign occupiers with most candidates too scared to campaign, the location of polling sites kept secret until the last minute and key areas unable to participate — have become not an example of democracy but an embarrassment to the very idea of democracy.

Meanwhile, a global poll for the BBC last week showed the U.S. more isolated than ever, with people in 18 out of 21 countries saying that they expect a second Bush term to have a negative impact on peace and security.

What is less clear is whether most Americans understand that this isolation leaves them more vulnerable to attack. Ms. Rice last week promised "a conversation, not a monologue" with the rest of the world. But as the situation in Iraq shows, conversations that start with "D'you want a piece of this?" rarely end well for anybody.

Both Osama bin Laden and the Taliban have shown that the tyrants the U.S. supports today can easily turn against it tomorrow while fostering resentment among their victims. Yet the idea that the U.S. is a civilising force endowed with benevolent intentions is still as prevalent within the U.S. as it is rejected outside it. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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