WHAT WAS OPPOSITION TO W BUT OPPOSITION TO HUMAN RIGHTS?:

Dangerously silent on human rights (Jackson Diehl, January 3, 2011, Washington Post)

Clinton's Bahrain visit reflected what seems to be an intractable piece of the Obama administration's character: a deeply ingrained resistance to the notion that the United States should publicly shame authoritarian regimes or stand up for the dissidents they persecute.

Yes, Obama made a public statement the day an empty chair represented Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo at the Nobel peace prize ceremony, and both he and Clinton issued statements last week when Russia's best-known political prisoner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was convicted on blatantly trumped-up charges. But in all sorts of less prominent places and cases, the U.S. voice remains positively timid - or not heard at all.

After Egypt's terrible elections in November, in which ballot boxes were blatantly stuffed and the opposition brutally suppressed, the administration's commentary was limited to bland statements issued by "the office of the press secretary" at State and the spokesman of the National Security Council. Three weeks earlier, at a widely watched joint press conference in Washington with Egypt's foreign minister, Clinton made no mention of the elections, the crackdown or anything else related to human rights.

In Latin America, friends of the United States marvel at its passivity as Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega systematically crush civil society organizations and independent media. "I don't see a clear policy," Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez - a good example of the sort of dissident Obama promised to defend - told me.

The Beltway wanted a Realist and got one. No fair whining that Realism is repulsive in practice.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 4, 2011 6:15 AM