Spreading democracy, the new British way, and America’s Guantánamo problem

Democracy: Something to really fight for or something that’s just good for a laugh?

George W. Bush has made something of an oratorical industry for himself out of urgent-sounding proclamations about the value and virtues of “freedom” and “democracy” (and, of what his handlers have him refer to poetically as “liberty”). Bush has explicitly stated that democracy’s rewards are numerous for countries that embrace it, even as he has mercilessly and illegally violated the democracy-enshrining, national constitution he was elected – and which he swore – to uphold; to date, he has stripped Americans of their most basic habeas corpus right and suppressed their essential First and Fourth Amendment protections.

AP

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has signaled something of a shift away from the American neoconservative approach, which saw the U.S. intervene in Iraq with the U.K.’s support

Over in Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, is also singing democracy’s virtues. Basically, he and Brown’s government are on the same democracy-trumpeting page as the Bush gang, albeit with certain qualifications that might make the shoot-first, negotiate-later Bush gang bristle. For instance, yesterday, in a major policy speech he delivered to an audience in Oxford, Miliband said “he understood the ‘deep concerns’ at the ‘mistakes’” that had been made in the so-called war on terror. (Daily Mail)

However, Miliband went on to make “an unequivocal case for what he described as the ‘democratic imperative,’” or “a moral commitment to the global dissemination of the principles of democratic government. This doctrine, known as ‘liberal interventionism’ because it attempts to introduce or encourage the development of liberal-democratic institutions in what have been totalitarian countries, has been under relentless fire since the notable attempts at it in Afghanistan and Iraq became so contentious.” Miliband “made clear that such dissemination should include military means if necessary. [He] argued that the tactical and strategic mistakes that have been made in the past must not be allowed to ‘cloud the debate’ and undermine the ethical case for enabling the less fortunate peoples of the world to live in freedom and security.” What is already being dubbed “the Miliband doctrine” holds that “democracy is of universal value”; it is “not simply a local subculture belonging to Europeans and their New World descendants.” (Telegraph)

Atef Hassan/Reuters

December 2007: A British soldier gestured toward photographers to keep their distance from the scene of a bomb attack that had taken place near Basra, in southern Iraq

Britain’s Daily Mail reports that, in his address, Milibrand said: “After the end of the Cold War[,] it was tempting to believe in the ‘end of history’ – the inevitable process of liberal democracy and capitalist economics. Now, with the economic success of China, we can no longer take the forward march of democracy for granted….The goal of spreading democracy should…combine both soft and hard power.” The Daily Mail notes that Miliband’s remarks “are likely to anger those on the left who hoped Gordon Brown’s administration would mark a clear break with the aggressive [, pro-Bush] foreign policy” that had been pursued by former Prime Minister Tony Blair.”

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Meanwhile, notes commentator Bronwen Maddox, in response to the news that the U.S. plans to try six terrorism suspects in Bush’s military courts – whose legal status is dubious – at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: “Every time there is a chance for the United States to escape from the trap it has created for itself in Guantánamo Bay, it slams the door shut. The Pentagon’s decision…to seek the death penalty for six men it accuses of the 9/11 attacks, and to try them under the hugely disputed version of military courts that it has devised, is one of the stupidest mistakes…the Bush administration has made.” (Times)

Maddox, the Times‘ chief foreign-affairs commentator, observes: “Everything about Guantánamo is an affront to the values the U.S. says it is defending in the [so-called] war on terror.” Alluding to certain basic, democratic values the U.S. appears to have forsaken, Maddox writes: “[H]olding hundreds of people there without charge, for years; the fluid rules of the ‘military commissions’ used for the very few who will be tried; the torture that the [Bush] administration acknowledges has been practiced on these six: all these are an assault on the U.S. Constitution. To see the most powerful country in the world scrabbling on the edge of a nearby island, with whose leader it is not on speaking terms, for the sole purpose of evading its own laws and principles, is an embarrassment.”

Joe Skipper/Reuters

September 2007: Reuters described these items as the “new, more comfortable leg shackles” that are being “used to restrain detainees…[at]…the maximum-security Camp Six at the [U.S.] Naval Station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba”

Going into the trials, Maddox adds, “[T]he U.S. should have the world on its side. On September 11, 2001, it had the world’s appalled, instinctive sympathy. It could have retained that by trying the suspected architects of the assault in its established courts, under principles of justice that go back to its founders. Instead, it has put itself in an indefensible position by subjecting its captives to new courts, under unclear rules. The Guantánamo trials, already the world’s slowest legal process, will implode under waves of justifiable legal challenge, and the world will regard the U.S., not the 9/11 suspects, as in the dock.”

Posted By: Edward M. Gomez (Email) |
February 13 2008 at 08:56 AM