"America's sovereign right to do whatever it pleases"

Date: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 @ 19:58:15 CST

Topic: John Chuckman

By John Chuckman

YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)

(YellowTimes.org) – The U.S. is claiming a "sovereign right" to try Iraqi officials as war criminals. I thought it was a nice touch, including, as it does, an allusion both to Bush's scholarly observations on Nazis and an assertion of rights. Rights are always good, aren't they? Even when they are the rights of conquest?

So, you attack a country for no other reason than an arrogant demand for "regime change," overwhelm its relatively puny armed forces, kill thousands of people, and claim a "sovereign right" to bring its leaders to trial? This threatens to become the model for international affairs in the twenty-first century, the banana-republic concept applied on a world scale.

America has refused to have anything to do with the International Court for War Crimes, but then the Creator never granted international institutions that purity of essence that is America's peculiar birthright. International institutions are corrupt. They are foreign. And they are not inclined to do things in the American way.

America, babbling endlessly about its rights and the way it sees things, so often displaying impatience over listening to the other 95% of the human race, easily forgets the many incontestable horrors it has bestowed upon the world. General Pinochet's murder of perhaps 15,000 Chileans plus a few Americans who got in his way gets barely a nod of drowsy recognition. The "boyz" chugging down frosty Cokes while napalming Vietnamese villages or the blood-soaked savagery of Cambodia's rice paddies are mostly forgotten. Few Americans ever caught, or cared to imagine, the screams of the Shah's victims having their finger nails extracted.

There have been so many of these good works that a full list would resemble a reference book rather than an article. Dealing with them on American television would make evening watching a drag, so they are forgotten, and America lumbers on to its next bellowing claim that something about the world stands in the way of its full enjoyment of rights and privileges.

Of course, none of America's chosen monsters ever saw a trial or tribunal by the United States. A few of them still live in quiet retirement. Why? Because they served American interests faithfully. If Saddam is tried, it will be precisely because he failed to do so. That's certainly an inspiring reason for bombing the hell out of a country.

But America is doing its very best, with precision missiles and gigantic bunker busting bombs, to be sure Hussein is murdered rather than captured. His trial, even if it does happen to fall to America as a sovereign right, would be exceedingly inconvenient for relations with the Arab world.

The United States asserts another arrogant claim, wrapped in different words, to justify its mistreatment of prisoners from Afghanistan. It ignored the Geneva Conventions, shackled hundreds of them up, flew them, blindfolded and strapped into cargo planes, to new homes in Cuba, which consist of cages far away from everything they know, with no access to lawyers or relatives, a form of slow torture used to extract information. Never mind that information gathered in this way is more likely to tell you what you want to hear than what actually is, and never mind that treating people in this way violates every principle America likes to say it holds sacred.

There is still another such claim, again expressed with altered words, to proclaim its right to determine who will govern Iraq when America's destructive tantrum is over. After all, it has had such success in Afghanistan on which to build. After killing thousands of innocent people there, wrecking the country's already damaged infrastructure, and sending tens of thousands fleeing their homes in terror, it set up a government whose key achievement to date is monthly assassinations.

That dire concern over women's rights in Afghanistan, something carefully tailored to the psychological needs of soccer moms who might have had a doubt or two about bombing villages, has faded into the mountain mists. An excellent proxy measure of America's violent achievement in Afghanistan is offered by a Canadian documentary filmmaker who observed that outside Kabul, virtually 100% of women still wear the burqa. The figure in Kabul, the only place policed by foreign troops, is about 70% and that comes with a great deal of abuse.

With a record like that, why wouldn't you feel justified in violently reordering the affairs of the planet? Quick success in Iraq will undoubtedly set Washington's ideologues' glands pumping and mouths watering. There's already talk about blasting Syria. Clearly, Iraq's shell game with weapons of mass destruction was continued on a grander scale, with the elusive weapons shifted to Syria for safekeeping, perhaps shipped in milk trucks by night. Hussein wouldn't use them to protect his life. No, after defeating the United States, he undoubtedly planned to reclaim them for another diabolical plot.

The possibilities must seem endless to Cheney, Condi, Rumsfeld, and Co. Indeed, regretfully for the rest of the planet, they undoubtedly are.

[John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. He has many interests and is a lifelong student of history. He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of reason, and concern for human decency. He is a member of no political party and takes exception to what has been called America's "culture of complaint" with its habit of reducing every important issue to an unproductive argument between two simplistically defined groups. John regards it as a badge of honor to have left the United States as a poor young man from the South Side of Chicago when the country embarked on the pointless murder of something like three million Vietnamese in their own land because they happened to embrace the wrong economic loyalties. He lives in Canada, which he is fond of calling "the peaceable kingdom."]

John Chuckman encourages your comments: jchuckman@YellowTimes.org

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...their crimes. "She/He had it coming etc., ..."

YellowTimes.org?? Whassa matter!?! Couldn't find an article put out by the country that is a model for what you and other leftist hope the US will become, the DPRK?

...is there anyone who doesn't hate the US that you don't agree with, Diogenes?

...what evil men in office do when they misuse the trust granted them does not equate to "hating one's country". You really do need to come up with a new lie. This one is wearing thin. In fact it is in tatters. Like your rather shallow mind.

Standing in opposition to faux patriot Brown Shirt Scum like yourself is, in my book, an act of high Patriotism.

Patriotism, real Patriotism, means looking after the best interests of one's country and does not require supporting policies which are contrary to the PRINCIPLES upon which this country was founded.

Please cite for me from the writings, of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Hamilton, or any other of the leading geniuses that conceived this country justification for your point of view. You cannot because the justification for your point of view lies in the writings, of Mao, Gramsci, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. You are no more a Patriot than Benedict Arnold or Vidkun Quisling.

>Patriotism, real Patriotism, means looking after the best interests of one's country and does not require supporting policies which are contrary to the PRINCIPLES upon which this country was founded.

So why do you and yours undermine the USA for the cause of liberalism/communism/socialism/imperialism/nazism/marxism?

Because, that's not your goal. Your political beliefs parallels that of Kim Jong Il.

... referring of course to the imbecile posting after me.

It is a measure of the bankruptcy of your position, bent over I presume, that you can muster nothing more than tepid insults unfounded in any semblance of truth. In short you are even an insult to your fellow imbeciles.

Because one stands in opposition to the Treasonous Swine infesting our government does not make one a leftist.

Your unthinking Stalinist invective is much more reminiscent of Stalin, Mao, or Hitler's dupes. You prove nothing other than that you have nothing to say.

-So why do you and yours undermine the USA for the cause of

liberalism/communism/socialism/imperialism/nazism/marxism?-

Please explain this absurd contradictory and pointless

spew.

democrat=liberal=anarchy=communist=socialist=nazi=imperialist=Hitler=Stalin=Mao=Marx=Kim Jong Il=Castro=same untimate goal

One cookie cutter, same cookie.

But you knew that

didn't you?

...since the facts are all running against the Shills, as usual, their only resort is false logic and character assassination.

It's their stock in trade.

Their only stock.

It doesn't matter if you like it or agree with it or any of that. It's what is we know to be the case. And the case is being made over and over again everyday to the American public in all types of various ads and media. Just like the protesters want to get out their message because they believe it needs to be said, so we're doing the same thing.

You keep whining about my same ol' message, but all I hear out of you is "Brown Shirt, Principles, Founding Fathers, blah blah, blah..."

You're running around like a chicken like it's head cut off. Your idealogy is dicredited, disaffected, and disillusioned, and you don't even know it.

You make me laugh.

...let's see if you can even get within a country mile of my position.

Can you summarize in one clear concise sentence free of personal attack or invective? Can you even make a clear statement on anything free of personal attack or invective?

>Can you summarize in one clear concise sentence free of personal attack or invective?

I do the "clear concise" stuff all the time, but what fun would it be without the personal attack things? No fun at all I tell you.

Com'n, if you can't make fun of liberalism and/or anarchy while tearing it pieces, you kill some of the thrill. I want the full package: clear & concise plus personal attacks.

Besides, I'm better at both of them than you are, so why shouldn't I? Exactly.

Sophomoric.

...you will.

"...faux patriot Brown Shirt Scum like yourself ..."

"...no more a Patriot than Benedict Arnold or Vidkun Quisling..."

"...the imbecile posting after me..."

"...the Shills..."

"...The Bush PR shills ..."

"...the usual brain dead un-Free Rezpublik assumptions..."

"...you are a walking insult to all your fellow morons..."

You go first.

...if the shoes fit wear them.

Those were not offered as insults just facts.