More along a similar vein from Bret Stephens. A good column worth reading in full:
Democracies and double standards
By BRET STEPHENS
"You are one of us. We expect from Israel more than we expect from Cambodia or Colombia."
So said Giancarlo Chevellard, the European Union's ambassador to Israel, in answer to a question I asked him last May with respect to the EU's failure to insist on the end of Syria's occupation of Lebanon. It was a telling remark, an honest one, and one that gets to the heart of much of what currently informs "world opinion" - meaning that segment of the public who think, with greater or lesser sophistication, that the world has more to fear from George Bush than it does from Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il.
"This crowd has the fear part down cold," writes New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd of the Bush administration's effect on the world. In a "news analysis," her colleague David Sanger observed that "Mr. Bush's speech [on Monday] almost certainly confirmed some of the world's worst fears about George Bush's America: that when the United Nations will not bend to its will, when the allies will not go along, Mr. Bush will simply break away and pull the trigger." And then there was syndicated cartoonist and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Ted Rall: "By launching an illegal, unsanctioned invasion of a sovereign nation," he wrote, "the US has abandoned its moral standing. We are, by definition, a rogue state."
SO HERE'S the US, about to end a regime that puts dissidents feet-first through plastic shredders and uses their corpses for fish food, and it stands accused of abandoning its moral standing. A while back, when the US was air-dropping food and medical supplies into Afghanistan, Britain's Guardian saw fit to ponder the questions: "Who asked Mr. Bush to 'save civilization'? Which bits of the planet does Mr. Bush term uncivilized? Some would say Afghanistan; others might nominate west Texas."
No doubt, if the US succeeds in installing a progressive regime in Baghdad, Bush will be accused in some quarters of installing an American puppet.
"Pardon the sardonic giggle," writes Nicholas von Hoffman in the New York Observer, "it arises from the thought that George W. Bush, the unelected president, is going to teach democracy to the Iraqis." Presumably, if Bush were to go to Baghdad personally to hand out Oreo cookies to Iraqi orphans, he'd be seen as a shill for Nabisco.
Plainly, then, the bar has been set high for this administration. Much of this can be explained as pure Bush hatred. I don't recall so much breast-beating when the Clinton administration sidestepped the UN over Kosovo to avoid a Russian veto, then proceeded to bomb Serbia from the inaccurate height of 15,000 feet to avoid anti-aircraft fire. Yet as dictators go, Milosevic was a softie next to Saddam. Nor was much made of the Clinton administration's refusal in 1997 to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Yet Bush's refusal to do the same is now condemned in a New York Times editorial for helping to crack the Atlantic alliance.
But matters do not rest there. Precisely because of America's great power, it is held to higher standards. "If one wants to be a world leader," says Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, "one must know how to look after the entire earth and not only American industry." Thus, if France inserts troops into one of its former colonial possessions, it is only exercising its usual prerogatives in its traditional sphere of influence. Whether it succeeds or fails, the footprints it leaves are small. But when the US walks the earth, the ground shakes. It is, says the German newsweekly Der Speigel, an "unfettered Gulliver."
It's a shame this point usually finds expression in tedious anti-American rants, because it has some merit. The US may wage war in the Muslim world without fear of a restive Arab minority at home; France cannot. The US may think it's in its interests that there be a Palestinian state established according to a precise timetable. Some Israelis would disagree. Conceivably, America could remove its troops from the Korean peninsula and then destroy the North's atomic facilities. But it would be South Korea and Japan that would be left to face the consequences.
"Throwing off the legitimacy of the United Nations, preferring force over law, means taking on a heavy responsibility," said Jacques Chirac on Tuesday. However else one may feel about Chirac's conduct in recent months, his point is inarguable. Just as the US will deserve primary credit if its Iraq venture goes well, it will deserve the blame if it goes badly.
A related point is made by Vermont Governor Howard Dean, now running for the Democratic nomination. "What is to prevent China," he asks, "some years down the road, from saying, 'Look what the United States did in Iraq - we're justified in going in and taking over Taiwan.'?"
Here too the argument is not simply baseless. Precedents matter, and presumably America should set good ones. If America is to adopt a doctrine of preemption, why shouldn't India with respect to Pakistan, to take another example? Since estimates of risk are always in the eye of the beholder, any attack by one country against another could be justified on the old Irish principle of "getting your retaliation in first." But this is a violation of the UN Charter, which justifies force only in self-defense or with the permission of the Security Council.
Finally, the point is made that it is not only wrong but un-American for the US to invade anyone, however worthy the cause. It's an argument with a distinguished pedigree. "Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled," wrote John Quincy Adams in 1821, "there will [America's] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." A century and a half later, Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern would make the same point with his "Come home, America" slogan.
Today, the great fear among the more principled opponents of the war against Iraq isn't that Saddam does not deserve to be removed, or that his weapons of mass destruction do not pose a more-than-hypothetical threat. Nor is it that, by waging war, the US will inflict more suffering on the Iraqis than it would by refraining from action.
Rather, as Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens writes, it's that "once the US invades Iraq, there will be no easy retreat from empire. We must get used to a world in which America makes the rules."
Lead, follow, or step aside, goes the popular American saying. Understandably, this is not a choice the rest of the civilized world feels comfortable with.
SUPERIOR RESPONSIBILITY, international precedent, the prospect of empire: I rehearse these anti-war arguments - fairly, I hope - because they are good ones.
Yet they are also curiously unreal. Take, for instance, the hypothetical I posed about America withdrawing its troops from South Korea and then sending the odd cruise missile into the Yongbyon nuclear facility. From the standpoint of America's national security interests at their most narrowly defined, it's probably the best way to deal with the problem. No American casualties, a huge potential threat to its security removed. Oh - and an ensuing barrage from 30,000 North Korean artillery pieces on Seoul. No great loss there, either, since the South Koreans haven't been the nicest hosts in recent months, and the world can live without Daewoos and Hyundais.
This could happen. Former world powers would not have hesitated. But the US won't, and in their hearts everyone - the South Koreans most of all - knows it.
Similarly, if, as Der Speigel has claimed, this is a war for oil, then nothing stands in America's way from conquering Iraq, then turning south to Riyadh. After all, most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, Saudi Arabia proselytizes for the most fanatical brand of Islam, and the regime is hardly one worth keeping. But everyone knows America won't do this, either.
Now take the question of precedent. As the legal scholar Eugene Volokh points out in Slate, "precedents chiefly influence those who care about equality and consistency and those willing to defer to the precedent-setter's judgment." Were the People's Republic to attack Taiwan, it might invoke the Iraq precedent for self-serving justification. But no one can seriously believe that "preemption" would be the real motive. By contrast, whatever one feels about the merits of toppling Saddam now and in this manner, Bush is nothing if not sincere when he speaks of the danger Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to international security.
It is not immediately obvious why the US, with so much power at its disposal, uses it comparatively sparingly. When Russia wanted to invade Chechnya for a second time in 1999, it went so far as to invent pretexts - there are good reasons to believe Putin's security services planted bombs in Russian apartment complexes - to do so. But America is different.
Perhaps this has to do with the country's self-conception. The world has changed since 1821; it is no longer plausible, if it ever was, for the US to remain aloof from world affairs. September 11 showed spectacularly that the terrorist threat to the US cannot be contained, or deterred, or defeated through conventional means, or held at a safe distance from American shores. Its existence throws overboard established ideas about aggression, and so the means required to counter it.
All the same, Quincy Adams's spirit abides. The US will not remain indefinitely in Iraq - Bush has said as much, and (again) everyone knows it - because Americans want a war of which they can be proud. If anything, the US may exit Iraq too soon for fear of being accused of colonialist ambitions. America's temptation is not imperialism, but isolationism - the other thing its critics like to complain about when the US threatens to pull its troops out of, say, Bosnia.
LET'S RETURN to the notion of superior responsibility. "World opinion" holds the US, and Israel, to a higher standard than other countries. This is a patent double-standard that harshly penalizes the occasional sins of the good guys while indulging the manifold sins of the bad guys. It also reeks of racism, as if, for instance, it is only to be expected when an Arab state does something atrocious, but when Israel misbehaves - well, that's a matter for the Security Council.
All the same, perhaps it is just as well. The world may hold the US and Israel to a higher standard, but so do Americans and Israelis themselves. It is this that has made both nations not only powerful but exceptional. And it is this that, when all is said and done, proves their critics wrong.
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