As someone who thinks the U.S. should take advantage of its historically unparalleled power and international influence to do some good in the world, my secondary foreign policy disappointment of the past several years -- second to the appalling death and destruction wrought -- is the near-total collapse of U.S. moral legitimacy. From minor (shunning allies) to shocking (Abu Ghraib, rendition, and even our intransigence on climate change), political actions have a real effect on the U.S. ability to (peacefully, effectively) promote the values that could really benefit people throughout the world.
There are some heartening signs, however, of increased pushback against this continued national nightmare, coming from a variety of political and pop culture sources. Here you have Rep. Jane Harman, hardly a shrinking violet on national security issues, advocating closing Gitmo and restoring habeas corpus. And this position isn't in a press release on her website, or from some awful Sunday morning talk show, it's on . . . a blog! With the usual caveat that Harman's improvement on these issues has come largely since a primary challenge from the left in 2006, the money quote:
It is al Qaida, not Iraq, that is our biggest problem, and we need much better strategies for dealing with it. It seems to me that restoring America's core values and proud legal traditions are a big piece of any strategy for improving our tarnished international standing and winning the argument with the next generation of would-be terrorists.Our national shame is also being exposed in pop culture, and I can think of no better skewering of the way we've departed from our founding and enduring values than this clip from Boston Legal, delivered by the inimitable and fantastic James Spader, a sarcastic rant that is concurrently hilarious and awful.
That's why restoring habeas corpus, reining in the use of national security letters, and shutting down the prison at Guantánamo Bay are so important.
The more people understand what the U.S. is really doing -- and has done -- the better. The more we talk about it the better. And the more we fight it, recognizing that it's hurting us all and hurting our country, the closer we are to changing and fixing it.
