HI-LO:

Democracies and double standards (Bret Stephens, Mar. 20, 2003, Jerusalem Post)

"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.

It's entirely appropriate to hold superior societies to a higher standard, so long as that means that we are not only forbidden the basest behaviors but expected to act out of the highest ideals. For precisely the same reasons that we must wage war as morally as possible, we must, to be moral, wage some wars, must even invade and civilize some places. We shpuld expect more of ourselves, but that requires not just that we don't do some things but that we do others. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 25, 2003 9:00 AM