"A revolutionary state, a state determined to overthrow the Westphalian order of sovereign states"

[kpete]

An Interview with Tom Farer, Author of ‘Confronting Global Terrorism’
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED April 28, 2008


As I elaborate in my book, for years prior to the ascension of Bush 43, neocon publicists had been disparaging international law and institutions and calling for the American Gulliver to free itself from these puny restraints so that it could fulfill its noble mission of remaking the world. In effect, they were calling on the U.S. to become what it had opposed both by fighting the Axis powers in World War II and by confronting the Soviet Union in the Cold War, to become, that is, a revolutionary state, a state determined to overthrow the Westphalian order of sovereign states each to a great degree free to do what it wished internally.

From the moment it assumed office the Bush-Cheney Administration began translating neocon doctrine into national policy. The withdrawal of the U.S. signature from the Treaty establishing the International Criminal Court (as opposed to merely letting it languish in the U.S. Senate without hope of ratification), the refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming: These and other acts were a declaration of independence from the constantly growing web of international obligations that the U.S. more than any other country had helped to weave at least since the end of World War II.

The assault on international humanitarian law, like Attorney General Gonzales’s reference to aspects of the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” was of a piece with this overall strategy of aggression against constraint in the form of the consensus of lesser states about the rules of the game which, in Dick Falk’s words, is “encoded” in international law and international institutions. But I do think this particular assault had its own motive force. I think that after September 11 Bush and his little circle genuinely feared further attacks and were convinced that torture was a necessary means of securing actionable intelligence and that the widest possible roundup and isolation of suspects in gulags was an important measure for disrupting Al Qaeda. The fact that they were hard-ass conservatives, intellectually and emotionally unconnected to the great 20th Century development of a human rights perspective on the world, meant that they could proceed without emotional discomfort. In philosophical terms there are extreme consequentialists. As long as, in their mind, they were serving the greater good, the quality of their means are irrelevant. Individual interests whether to life, due process or protection from torture have to yield to the tribal good.

I make the same point in my book where in explaining why, despite similar rhetorical commitments to freedom and democracy, liberal and neocons are separated by an unbridgeable philosophical chasm, I compare the neocons to Marxist true-believers. The Marxists too envisioned greater freedom as the endpoint of the triumph of communism. Once the world passed through the stages of class war and proletarian dictatorship, Nirvana would be reached, a Nirvana where, with the problems of production and distribution solved, a person could be a mechanic in the morning, a fly fisherman in the afternoon, and a poet in the evening. Unfortunately a great deal of blood would have to be spilled along the way. Both neocons and radical nationalists like Cheney are ready to spill the blood. Well, not personally, of course, if one recalls the vice president’s statement that he avoided service in the Vietnam War, despite supporting it in theory, because he had more important things to do.

much more at:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/04/hbc-90002880

[Karenina]

1. Scott Horton is a truth-teller.

[Cerridwen]

2. Kick. n/t