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=> The Gift That Just Keeps Giving.
| The Gift That Just Keeps Giving. |
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Posted by
AirAmericaRadio.com
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- Monday, August 1 2005, 4:12:44 (CEST) from 67.49.24.86 - cpe-67-49-24-86.socal.res.rr.com  Commercial -  Windows XP -  Internet ExplorerWebsite: http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20050730/cm_huffpost/004896;_ylt=AtMJYgteWPu29vz3jLY4vood6sgF;_ylu= Website title: Hooman Majd: A White House Gift - Yahoo! News |
Hooman Majd In President Bush’s perpetual war on terror, wonders never cease. Even when faced with the obvious and right thing to do, the administration, almost perversely, chooses the irrational and wrong. This week’s case was the White House block of a vote on a Senate measure (sponsored by a number of Republicans) to define “illegal combatant” and to prohibit cruelty against and inhumane treatment of prisoners in military facilities. The main problem with Mr. Bush’s stand on the issue isn’t so much that it is morally wrong (although it clearly is by any human standard), rather, it’s that it is plainly stupid at a time when America’s image in the world continues to suffer. The President’s actions couldn’t be less helpful to his own cause of public diplomacy as a tool to improve America’s standing in the Muslim world, or to his favored cause of spreading American-style democracy in the Middle East. It is one thing for Karen Hughes to try and sell America to the Muslims when America has something to sell, i.e. good (or at least defensible) foreign policy and a great democracy; it’s altogether another thing to try and sell America when it engages in indefensible, to say nothing of repugnant, behavior. Ask anyone in a Middle Eastern city (Tehran, for example, from where I write this today) about human rights or democracy in the Islamic world and they might point you back to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Ask any American diplomat sitting inside the bunker-fortress of an embassy whether Guantanamo makes his or her life or job any harder, and the truthful answer will be yes. Ask Dina Powell, on her next trip to her native Egypt, to sit with a bunch of students and explain to them that America is all about freedom and democracy and the rule of law, but that we might torture suspects from time to time because POTUS can’t be unduly restricted in his powers. Ask Ms. Hughes (once she gets around to taking office at the State Department) to go on Al Jazeera to promote the American way of life, which for a Muslim prisoner just might, from time to time, include being walked around on a leash during exercise breaks. Outside of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the greatest gifts bestowed upon bin Laden and his ilk (and poison for pro-U.S. Muslim voices) by the Bush administration were Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Apparently it’s the gift that just keeps giving. --------------------- |
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