God Help Me, I Am Going To Defend George W. Bush

(Deep breath, as one draws before jumping into a cold shower)

My friend Mike Hastings is not being fair to George W. Bush here:

With Libya, Obama would demonstrate for the first time, through his actions, how he viewed America's role in the world, attempting to live up to the lofty declarations he made when he had crafted his National Security Strategy a year earlier. Going forward, he wrote, the U.S. would "avoid acting alone" and "reject the notion that lasting security and prosperity can be found by turning away from universal rights." Democracy, he insisted, "does not merely represent our better angels, it stands in opposition to aggression and injustice, and our support for human rights is both fundamental to American leadership and a source of our strength in the world." It was a resounding rejection of the cowboy unilateralism and human-rights-be-damned ethos of the Bush era.

There's an unfortunate tendency that writers on the left have developed to conflate Bush's actual human rights record with the human rights record he wanted. Any attentive reader of conservative interventionist argumentation over the years cannot help but notice a frequent concern with human rights and with democracy. Are those arguments pretextual and convenient? Cynics like me will say yes, since they tend to be made loudest against U.S. enemies (Iran, Syria) and rarely when it causes conservative cognitive dissonance (i.e., the human rights of Palestinians to live free of Israeli occupation). 

But that's a far cry from saying that they, or George W. Bush, have a "human-rights-be-damned" ethos. They have a substantially different view of how to promote human rights than do liberals. I don't share it, because I'm not a conservative, but it does no one any good to pretend that it doesn't exist. 

The uncomfortable truth is that a belief in human rights is a disruptive force in global affairs. It scrambles ideological boundaries and takes people down intellectual roads they did not anticipate travelling. It's why the Responsibility To Protect is a force for -- let's strip it of euphemism -- war. Not because, say, Ken Roth or Samantha Power are warmongers; that's absurd. But because the world, and America, has yet to come to terms with the obligations that human rights place on nations, particularly hegemonic ones.

To support the R2P seems like a recipe for endless war; to oppose it, a recipe for endless injustice and impunity. The responsible work of intellectuals and policymakers is to bridle it, to make it commensurate with American capabilities and American interests; to shape a world in which America is not the only nation burdened with enforcing it; and not to avoid the circumstances in which it conflicts with American capabilities and American interests. Conservatives will and should be a part of that work, because they believe in human rights as well. 

Comments

[Sic 'em]

Just find a rightwinger and smash his [sic] through a plate glass window Attackerman!!

[Ron]

I've never met you, but I think I love you, Spencer. Not for defending W, though I admire the ability to do so without losing your lunch. But for this sentence alone:

"To support the R2P seems like a recipe for endless war; to oppose it, a recipe for endless injustice and impunity."

If I'm ever in a bar and you happen to show up, I PROMISE that your next drink is on me. (Yeah, I live in DC. Could actually happen.)

[fuster]

Interestingly, today at preformed commentt , the author decided that the current fighting between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers Party "ensued from George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq ".

[drew]

except for all the torturing of people by employees or contractors of the american government. and the legal justification thereof by the bush administration's justice department. etc.

[Chris]

You give Bush et. al. too much credit. If the concern was "pretextual and convenient," doesn't that imply that it was so far removed from the actual motivations that it had very little influence on policy?

The Bush administration used actual concerns on the left for human rights in the countries they sought to invade to convince liberals that the war cause was just. Then they just did what they wanted (e.g., dronings and torture), human rights be damned. Obama is guilty of this too, Libya notwithstanding.