So why else has my life been a little crazy recently, in addition to taking off for a weekend in Boston with Faiza?
Tomorrow, Bill and I leave for a couple of weeks in New Zealand. Which will be mainly fun and interesting. (So long as not too many Kiwis are still angry with me on account of my comments about Gallipoli last April? Rotten tomatoes as we arrive at Auckland airport? What do you think?)
Anyway, that’ll give me an opportunity to blog a bit from lands Antipodean… about Restorative Justice , which is quite widely practised there, and also about white-Maori relations, which still fascinate me.
Yesterday, after my return from Boston, I conducted back-to-back interviews for an oral-history project called StoryCorps, which has had a mobile recording studio/trailer on the downtown mall in Charlottesville for the past couple of weeks.
Yesterday late afternoon, I entered the recording booth first of all with my friend Jay Worrall, an 89-year-old Quaker who headed up the “War on Poverty” programs here in Charlottesville back in the 1960s and 1970s> As Jay explained it, dealing with poverty here in Virginia involved first and foremost tackling the problems and legacies of of racial segregation and other forms of discrimination. In the interview, he talked about getting arrested with nine other C’ville Quakers at the entrance to the White House back in those days.
Interestingly, Jay had been in the US Army before getting into the anti-poverty work. Including, he was in the Army for a long time after he became a Quaker. In the Army, he’d been a Military Police officer, and for a few years he was even head of the Army’s criminal Investigation Division units in greater DC.
He said that when he got arrested at the White House– this was after he’d left the army– one of the detectives who questioned him had been someone he’d worked with when he’d been running the Army CID… “”And he couldn’t quite figure out how I got to be where I was.”
The other interview I did was with a great couple of my acquaintance, Dr. Matthew Holden, a distinguished political scientist, and Dorothy Holden, a distinguished quilt artist.
Matthew talked about growing up in an African-American farm family in a town called Mound Bayou, Mississippi, that had been founded in the late 19th century by former slaves. His family had to leave the farm after a terrible drought in 1943, and moved to Chicago… He later became a much respected political-science professor; was President of the American Political Science Association; and testified in Congress about the inappropriateness of using an impeachment proceeding in the case of Bill Clinton’s dalliance (however sordid) with Monica Lewinsky.
In our pre-interview, he’d talked a little bit about the experience of picking cotton, which he’d done some of to help his father when he was still young. Cotton, he explained, really tears your hands up when you pick it. In addition, you have to drag a huge sack along the row behind you, on the ground, as you pick; and as it gets heavier it hurts your back really badly…
I wish I’d pressed him some more for some of those details during the recording session itself.
Dorothy talked with great passion about some of the things she’d done during desegregation years in the 1960s and 1970s, including helping write a big report for the Wisconsin library system on how to improve the portrayal of African-Americans in books for children.
She also talked a little about her quilting. Here you can see some slightly grainy images of two of her quilts.
Her work is so beautiful! You can’t really get a full picture of it there.
With Faiza in Boston
My life has been fairly crazy. I flew up to Boston for the weekend so I could both meet Iraqi blog queen Faiza (who’s been at this training course in southern Vermont) and visit my son, who’s in Boston for the summer. I decided to take my youngest, Lorna, who’s 20. Old enough to help me drive up to Dulles airport from Charlottesville, not old enough to drive a rental car in New England. Oh well.
Our United flight from Dulles to Boston got brought down in Philly for a couple of hours due to “mechanical problems”. Oh well.
After we arrived I dropped the daughter with the son, then ways behind schedule made the drive over to Brattleboro. I found New England bathing in an unaccustomedly steamy sauna of heat.
Anyway, meeting Faiza was a breath of fresh air. She drove back to Boston/Cambridge with me and we talked all the way. We have a lot in common, stretching back a long time. Politically, and family-wise. We each have three young-adult kids. She’s just about the most animated veiled woman I’ve ever encountered.
(A lot of westerners– many of whom, I suspect, have never met a veiled woman– think that wearing a veil somehow “makes” a woman into a timid, submissive doormat. Far from it! For many Muslim Arab women whom I know, wearing a veil enables them to go out and participate in the public sphere. And many of them do so in a very self-confident, outspoken manner. Faiza is one of those.)
“Knowing” someone through her or his blog is a funny thing. Certainly, Faiza’s writing on her blog is very intimate, and gives you the feeling you really know her fairly well. And then you meet her… Wow!
I was interested mainly to learn more about her view of the situation in her country, and of what it is possible to do there, politically, in today’s horrible circumstances.
I was so happy to find that she hadn’t lost hope– at all. Though she didn’t underestimate at all, either, the ghastliness of the circumstances in most of Iraq.
Faiza talked a bit about her involvement with Adnan Pachachi’s list of candidates in the run-up to the January 30th election. Apparently, they asked her to run, and she was ready to do so. But then Pachachi dropped out at the last minute– after the US authorities started pressuring the heads of all the lists to commit to NOT pressing for any deadline for a US force withdrawal. Refusing to bow to that pressure was, she thought, quite the right thing to do.
She expressed at some point her disappointment (or worse) with the people in the Iraqi “government” that did emerge from the elections. She stressed that most of them were recently returned exiles, who’d come back to Iraq with the occupation, and who didn’t seem to know much or care much about the networks of people that had long existed inside the country. We talked a bit about Ibrahim Jaafari, comparing him with the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Her view, in general, was that while both of them seemed at one level to be decent, worthy people, still “they were participating in politics in the wrong way, at the wrong time.” (This is, certainly, very much my own view re Mahmoud Abbas. I was interested to hear that she made this exact same analysis of Jaafari.)
Faiza seemed very confident that her disappointment (and worse) in the current Iraqi “government” has become very widely shared throughout Iraq. “My dear! Thibngs were horrible in Iraq in the months after the election. Just horrible! And all the politicans could do in those months was sit around and argue over who gets which ministry. No-one was thinking of helping the people, at all!”
Lech Walesa on detention issues
The International Committee of the Red Cross’s flagship publication, the International Review of the Red Cross has devoted most of its latest issue to the question of detentions.
All the articles there that I’ve been able to look at look really, really interesting and important. Including this one, on “Human Rights and Indefinite Detention”.
But perhaps this interview with Lech Walesa— who was interned by the pro-Soviet regime in Poland a number of times in the 1970s, and then again in 1981– is the article that should receive the widest circulation inside the US. (To most members of the US political elite, especially those who shout loudest about the need to “extend freedom”, Walesa– like Vaclav Havel– is regarded as a big hero.)
Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
- Qun: Coming back to detention issues, where are the limits that because of religious or moral reasons we are not allowed to overstep?
The United States leads the world economically and militarily, but it no longer does so morally. This is partly due to the fact that it has occasionally resorted to immoral methods to fight the phenomenon of international terrorism. It says: we have the money, we have the means, and we will fix the problem ourselves. But how much will this cost in human terms? You have to prove your high moral standing by deeds, not by words. This also applies to detention. I say it with all due respect for the reasonable concerns of the United States and as a friend of the Americans, who are facing serious threats from terrorist organizations…
What are the responsibilities of politicians?
Politicians have a moral and legal obligation to give clear and unambiguous messages and instructions to uphold minimum humanitarian standards even in the worst situations. It is their moral responsibility. I am afraid the present international atmosphere is not helping us, but I believe that everybody is increasingly aware of their responsibilities and that we are heading in a better direction.
I must say I do not share his optimism on that last count.
One small window into Gitmo
The best definition of torture that I know of is one I heard from a physician at the renowned Danish center for treatment and rehabilitation of torture victims. He said, “Torture is an attempt to destroy the indpendent human personality.”
Physical abuse is often a part of it. But the most devastating part is the systematic attempt, using psychological mechanisms, to break a person’s mind.
This is why I found reading the interrogator’s report printed in this week’s Time magazine so disturbing.
Including these portions:
- 20 December 2002
1115: … Interrogater began by reminding the detainee about the lessons in respect and how the detainee had disrespected the interrogators. Told detainee that a dog is held in higher esteem because dogs know right from wrong and know how to protect innocent people from bad people. Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog. Detainee became very agitated.
21 December 2002
2223: As I began to inform the detainee of the changes the Saudi government has been making in order to support the efforts of peace and terror free world I began to engage closeness with the detainee. [I’m assuming the writer of this report is probably female ~HC] This really evoked strong emotions within the detainee. He attempted to move away from me by all means. He was laid out on the floor so I straddled him without putting my weight on him. He would then attempt to move me off of him by bending his legs in order to lift me off but this failed because the MPs were holding his legs down with their hands. The detainee began to pray loudly but this did not stop me from finishing informing the detainee about the Al Qaeda member, Qaed Salim Sinan al Harethi aka Abu Ali, that was killed by the CIA.
Here below is an entry that has many terms that I don’t understand. (Can anyone explain “sissy slap” to me?) But buried in it is a reference to “dance instruction” that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who remembers the scene in the movie “The Pianist” where the German guards at the crossing point out of the Warsaw ghetto force some of the Jewish detainees waiting to walk through it to dance for the guards’ own amusement…
Or, the narratives of enslaved African people on British and American slave ships being forced to “dance” for the amusement of the boat’s crew members…
- 13 December 2002
1115: Interrogators began telling detainee how ungrateful and grumpy he was. In order to escalate the detainee’s emotions, a mask was made from an MRE box with a smily face on it and placed on the detainee’s head for a few moments. A latex glove was inflated and labeled the “sissy slap” glove. The glove was touched to the detainee’s face periodically after explaining the terminology to him. The mask was placed back on the detainee’s head. While wearing the mask, the team began dance instruction with the detainee. The detainee became agitated and began shouting.
While you’re reading these accounts, don’t forget that physical force and violence are also being used on the detainee at this point; and earlier, considerably more physical violence may well have been used on him.
The excerpt Time has there on its website is fairly short. But there is no mention anywhere in it of the interrogators actually asking the detainee for any information. Their intention seems only to be to humiliate and “break” him. (Perhaps also to try to “test” some of their techniques on him?)
But what useful information would he have anyway, in December 2002– probably more than a year after he was captured?
Why was he still there, being tortured and humiliated in that way?
He is most likely still there. (Only a small proportion of Gitmo detainees have been released since then.)
Is he still– 30 months after December 2002– being subjected to these kinds of humiliations? Quite likely. Can you imagine what happens to a human personality after a total of, now, some 42 months of abuse, torture, and outrageous, intentional humiliation along these lines?
And Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have now firmly told everyone— including the President, who looked like he might be getting a little “wobbly” on this point– that they have no intention of closing the Guantanamo prison.
A Hoagland classic
Jim Hoagland, MSM’s war-drum-beater-in-chief in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq (on behalf of his trusted pal, A. Chalabi) seems to be running scared… He’s writing in the WaPo today about a “dangerous” transition point having been reached.
Oh my! What danger might that be, Jim?
Here’s what he wrote:
- That dangerous transition point could be glimpsed in this month’s Post-ABC News survey, when 52 percent of those polled said that the war in Iraq was not contributing to American security and 49 percent said they disapproved of President Bush’s handling of the global war on terrorism.
Polls are snapshots that change quickly, as White House aides quickly pointed out. But this one reflects my own anecdotal sense of a shift that I have been hearing about from politicians and activists in the nation’s capital and elsewhere over the past six weeks. This survey should be treated by the White House as a serious warning.
Here’s more of his diagnosis of this “danger”:
- It is not just the surge of violence in both conflicts in the past month that is shaking support for Bush. It is also the growing concern of middle-of-the-road Americans that they cannot trust the information they are being given by the administration — and particularly by the Pentagon — about the conduct and progress of these wars…
The failure to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has forced the administration to emphasize the moral reasons that underlie the case for regime change, a cause I argued for through four successive administrations. But it is American morality — not Saddam Hussein’s demonstrated lack thereof — that is becoming a defining issue now, however unfair that may seem.
So is he calling for greater morality and accountability for all participants in US political life? That might seem logical don’t you think?
Nah. If our Jimbo were to do that, he might have to face up to to the nefarious role he himself played in having beaten the drums for this war.
He might feel he ought to apologise, at the very least, to the families of the nearly 1,700 US service members killed in Iraq to date– as well as to all Iraqis for the devastation that the war he helped to bring about has visited on their country.
If he were Japanese, then considering the gravity of the suffering he has materially helped to cause in the world, he might consider falling on his sword in repentance.
No, Jim, I’m not recommending harakiri. Some kind of reparative action would be far more useful for the world. (Contact me if you want suggestions. I have plenty.)
But starting out with a full mea culpa, and a clear apology, and a resignation from the extremely high-paid and respected position you occupy in the WaPo could be a good place to start.
Secret revealed
I’m in Boston with Faiza of A Family in Baghdad this weekend. I’d originally been hoping that Susan of Dancewater could be with the two of us someplace, but that isn’t going to work out this time round. (I think she’s getting with Faiza later in the month.)
Anyway, being with Faiza is a blast. She’s as animated, informative, and talkative in real life as you’d expect from her blog.
More, later. We have a full day together today.
Looks a lot like apartheid to me
WaPo reporters Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru had a great piece in today’s paper. Shadid, who speaks Arabic, went along with one of the newly forming “Iraqi” fighting units, and Fainaru, who doesn’t went with the Iraqis’ American military “handlers”.
This is one little excerpt:
- Last week, U.S soldiers from 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, and Iraqis from 2nd Platoon, Charlie Company, clambered into their vehicles to patrol the streets of Baiji. The Americans drove fully enclosed armored Humvees, the Iraqis open-backed Humvees with benches, the sides of which were protected by plating the equivalent of a flak jacket. The Americans were part of 1st Battalion, 103rd Armor Regiment of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.
As an American reporter climbed in with the Iraqis, the U.S. soldiers watched in bemused horror.
“You might be riding home alone,” one soldier said to the other reporter.
“Is he riding in the back of that?” asked another. “I’ll be over here praying.”
Here’s another:
- The [Iraqi] men are housed at what they call simply “the base,” a place as sparse as the name. Most of the Iraqis sleep in two tents and a shed with a concrete floor and corrugated tin roof that is bereft of walls. Some have cots; others sleep on cardboard or pieces of plywood stacked with tattered and torn blankets. The air conditioners are broken. There is no electricity.
Drinking water comes from a sun-soaked camouflage tanker whose meager faucet also provides water for bathing.
“This is the shower of the National Guard, Baiji Division,” said Tala Izba, 23, a corporal, as others laughed.
“Mines, car bombs and our duties, and then we have to come back to this?” said another soldier, Kamil Khalaf.
Pvt. Aziz Nawaf, 23, shook his head. “At night, I’m so hot I feel like my skin is going to peel off,” he said.
Almost to a man, the soldiers said they joined for the money — a relatively munificent $300 to $400 a month. The military and police forces offered some of the few job opportunities in town. Even then, the soldiers were irate: They wanted more time off, air-conditioned quarters like their American counterparts and, most important, respect. Most frustrating, they said, was the two- or three-hour wait to be searched at the base’s gate when they returned from leave.
Well, it doesn’t seem like they’ll be sticking around long. Here’s how that excerpt continues:
- The [Iraqi] soldiers said 17 colleagues had quit in the past few days.
“In 15 days, we’re all going to leave,” Nawaf declared.
The two-dozen soldiers gathered nodded their heads.
“All of us,” Khalaf said. “We’ll live by God, but we’ll have our respect.”
And right up at the beginning of the piece, the reporters wrote about this:
- An hour before dawn, the sky still clouded by a dust storm, the soldiers of the Iraqi army’s Charlie Company began their mission with a ballad to ousted president Saddam Hussein. “We have lived in humiliation since you left,” one sang in Arabic, out of earshot of his U.S. counterparts. “We had hoped to spend our life with you.”
I guess that’s what you get when all you try to do to enroll soldiers is to pay them (relatively) big bucks, rather than giving them a political vision that seems worth fighting for.
It strikes me that, given that the Iraqi units the US has been training seem to have dissolved away time and time again (as “Charlie Company”* seems on the point of doing), and given that the US forces themselves are in the midst of a massive recruitment shortfall… the only halfway workable thing to do at this point is to organize a complete US withdrawal from Iraq. As speedy and as honorable and in as good an order as possible.
That is one of the three key points Raed Jarrar is calling for, in this important Wednesday post on his blog Raed in the Middle.
Here are all his three points:
- (1) Issue a Public Apology and hold responsibility for the destruction of Iraq…
(2) Announce A Schedule For Complete Military Pullout From Iraq; a full withdrawal that leaves no permanent bases behind. I think a timetable of one year is more than enough for all the troops to leave safely without being attacked by the resistance…
(3) Start fixing the mess caused by the war and occupation by both Paying Compensation And Bringing War Criminals To Justice…
That looks like an excellent, very clear list.
—-
* Over on Today in Iraq, I saw that Shirin commented that even just calling this unit in the “Iraqi” army “Charlie Company” showed an incredibly arrogant American mindset.
Iranian soccer revels
Here are some intriguing pictures of the revelries at various spots around Teheran on Wednesday night, after the Iranian soccer team beat Bahrain and thus secured a spot in the World Cup playoffs.
Basically what seems to have happened there is that masses of young people (and some, as you can see from the photos, not so young) took to the streets to express their delight, just as people in many other countries might have.
But in Teheran on Wednesday night, there were women and men celebrating together. And some of the young women seemed to have just about lost their headscarves, altogether.
From the point of view of the hardline clerics who’ve been running the country for 25 years, this must have seemed like the height of decadence. (They should see what goes on in most US college towns during the students’ three-day weekends…)
But significantly, the baseej, that is, the Revolutionary Guards who act as a kind of “morals police” in Iran, have been reported by many sources as having nearly all just sat around watching, or even, making themselves scarce… And so the revels continued.
Why was this? An interesting question that I don’t feel qualified to answer. But here are a couple of guesses:
- (1) There’s an important election in Iran next week. One might surmise that the mullahs don’t want to alienate a great chunk of the youth by cracking down on them so close to the day; and that the regime’s relatively light touch toward the revelers may be designed to entice members of the younger generation into the voting booth, at least, rather than sitting the election out as so many have been threatening to do; and
(2) The overwhelming theme seems to have been an Iranian-nationalist one. This is not, by any means at all, bad for the mullahs at a time when they still feel themselves under threat by the Americans. The revelers certainly weren’t waving the Stars and Stripes, or holding aloft representations of the “Statue of Liberty”. Instead, their biggest symbolism was the three colors of the flag. Iranian nationalism? That’s by and large quite okay by the mullahs.
On the other hand… I hate to sound like a grouch here… But just how much of a victory is it, really, if a country with a population of 67 million can field a soccer team that beats one from a country with a population of 700,000?
Hiroshima + 60, part 2
I took part in our town’s peace vigil yesterday again, as I always try to do if I’m in town on a Thursday afternoon. The honking response from the drivers was great. Once again, there were times when there was a pretty awesome cacophony of honking from drivers waiting for the lights to change. Someone came by on a bike and, referring to the recent polls showing that Bush’s Iraq policy has been rapidly losing public support at home, said, “So you guys have been making a difference!”
(I wish I’d replied, “Yes, maybe. But why don’t you either come and stand with us, or at least give our peace center a nice fat donation.”)
Anyway, at around ten minutes of six, the heavens opened. As if the Almighty had opened a trapdoor in the sky and simply dumped around three inches of water on us within five minutes. That was what it felt like. I was stuck out on one corner on my my own with no shelter in sight. So I stuck it out, holding up my “Honk 4 peace” sign. There were some euphoric minutes of me standing there in the swirling waters of the sidewalk doing that, while cars still sloshed on forward through the driving gray rain and honked at us. Then I started to feel quite cold. I stuck it out till our usual ending time of 6 p.m., then a small group of us went to Christian’s Pizza on the downtown mall to start making plans for our annual Hiroshima/Nagasaki Day observation.
This year is the 60th anniversary of the terrible, terrifying decisiopn to drop those two bombs. (This year, also, H/N Day– August 6th– actually falls on a Saturday, which helps our planning some.)
We made some fairly good plans. I think. One of them is to do a sort of “Listening Project” with young people in our community, and just ask them what they know about the bombing of Hiroshima, and what they think of it.
President Truman’s decision to drop those two bombs– both of them on parts of Japan that he knew were heavily populated by civilians– marked the dawn of the “Atomic Era”. It was the only time in history that nuclear weapons have ever been used in combat.
The dropping of the two bombs was also the paradigmatic use, by the US national command structure, of the tactic of “shock and awe”. It was referred to as such by Harlan Ullmann, the author of the “S&A” document. The idea– not totally dissimilar to the thinking behind plans pursued by terrorists– was to launch an act so shocking (and shocking in part because it directly killed and wounded so many civilians) that the national command structure of the country targeted would instantly change its policies, and cave to US demands regarding the terms of the surrender.
The Bush administration’s continued commitment to the pursuit of “S&A” policies of various sorts, including in Iraq in 2003, is one way in which the events of August 6 and August 9, 1945, are still very relevant today. Another is the way in which possession of nuclear weapons has continued, from that day until now, to be a marker of great potency within the international political system. For example, why on earth should anyone think that the five favored “permanent members” of the UN Security Council should be the five “recognized” nuclear-weapons-states?
NW possession is a huge marker of many other aspects of international relations, too…
The US-apartheid analogy, contd.
Commenters on this recent post have asked me to spell out more about my reasons for drawing this analogy.
At the top of that post, I identified four different strands of similarity that, imho, support this analogy.
At one level, perhaps it’s true that both kinds of policies, SA apartheid and US foreign policy since 9/11, fall into the broader category of being some form of “colonial” policies.
However, here are a few reasons why I think that it may well be more instructive to hold up to Americans the mirror of the fact that that their (our) country’s current foreign policy is “apartheid-like”, rather than that it is “colonial”.
Firstly, at the broad level of public rhetoric, the discourse of “colonialism” is not understood in anything like the same way in the US that it is in the rest of the world. “Colonial” is not, in fact, generally considered to be a bad attribute of anything, for most US citizens– Native Americans excepted. The US has never gone through the same process of “decolonization” that marked European society in the middle years of the 20th century. In this country, indeed, “colonial” is an admired architectural style, and a reference to a period of the country’s history that is overwhelmingly seen (except by Native Americans and African-Americans) as a sort of foundational golden age. I kid you not.
For example, the major newspapers of the Mid-Atlantic region where I live have all, these past few weeks, been running ads under the large title “The Colonial me… “ These ads are inviting people– even, and this strikes me as the height of chutzpah, some of them explicitly inviting African-American people– to “reconnect” with the values of hard work, pioneering, close community, etc that marked the “colonial era”… Namely, by visiting a tourist destination over in the east of Virginia that goes by the formal name of (I kid you not!) “Colonial Williamsburg”.
Now, I grew up in an England, in the 1950s and 1960s where just about every week or so it seemed, some grateful “new” African or Asian nation would be “given” its independence through the generous and foresighted policies of Her Majesty’s Government. There’d be the grainy images on the old Pathe newsreels of colonial governor X hauling down the Union Jack and new “President” Y– who sometimes would have been pulled only the previous week out of the jail he’d been sent to previously as a “terrorist” or “insurgent” leader– would solemnly haul up the flag of the new independent country.
As kids, we somehow knew that that was the right thing to do. (Even if I did sometimes hear my father asking quietly and subversively if “self” government was necessarily always so much better than “good” government… With the twin assumptions buried there that “of course”, British colonial government had always been good, and “of course” it would be very hard to imagine the “natives” being able to practise anything approaching good government… Oh well, RIP my dear late father, eh?)
But here in the US, as I’ve remarked on JWN a number of times before, the term “colonial” is understood in a completely different way than it is understood just about anywhere else in the rest of the world.
That is my first reason for saying that holding up a mirror of “colonialism” to US citizens reagrding their (our) government’s policies around the world may not be particularly helpful.
Holding up a mirror of “apartheid” may not be accurate in some respects, I grant you. The US does not have an institutionalized policy of discriminating against people on the grounds of skin color.
On the other hand, there are enough ways in which the US relationship with the rest of the world under Bush is the same or very similar to the White South Africans’ relationship with the rest of their non-White compatriots under apartheid that I believe the “apartheid” mirror can indeed be useful and instructive.
In one way, it all comes down to the kind of blind, solipsistic arrogance that (as some of the commenters on that earlier post noted) underlies both worldviews. “Arrogance” in that under George W. Bush the US has indeed arrogated to itself the right to make all the major decisions regarding war and peace in the world, even in defiance of the views of the rest of the world, as well as the right to try to dictate the forms of government that non-US citizens should practise.
Is there any better word for such acts of arrogation than “arrogance”?
This, despite the fact that the US citizenry (which GWB claims to represent– though thank God that claim is wearing thinner by the day right now) constitutes only 4% of the population of the world… At least, in South Africa, the “Whites” made up somewhere just over 10% of the national population. So their claims to be able to “speak for”, and indeed “decide on behalf of” all South Africans were that much stronger than the claims of the Bush administration to be able to speak for, or decide on behalf of, all of humanity.
Secondly, therefore, I would argue that even if US policy towards the rest of the world is not, as apartheid was, based on discrimination on the basis of skin color, still, it is based on discrimination based on citizenship (“We’re the US– we know best!”); and underlying both forms of discrimination is an incredibly strong sense of both arrogance and entitlement.
Holding up the mirror of our nation pursuing “apartheid-like” policies toward the rest of the world is useful, politically, in a number of ways, I think…