This sentence became the rallying cry for George Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his support for the war crimes of Arik Sharon and his successors. Except the United States is far more authoritarian than many of its citizens and certainly its politicians care to admit. A shining exception is Senator Jim Webb:
Let’s start with a premise that I don’t think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5% of the world’s population; we have 25% of the world’s known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world’s greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. . . .
I realize some people might think this topic peripheral to the concerns of this blog. But it is really quite central. The “intellectual” argument in support of U.S. interventionism is based on the premise that the United States is the freest, most democratic society on the planet and we need to spread freedom and democracy around the world. Both neo-con interventionism and its “liberal” counterpart are based on this same premise. The same premise is used to justify our blind support for Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
And yet, the reality is that millions of US citizens, whose great “crime” is that they like to use a drug which is not on our society’s “acceptable list”, live under a totalitarian, nightmarish regime, treated much like the slaves of yore (the thirteenth amendment, which bans slavery and “involuntary servitude,” specifically exempts criminals!). And in Israel, the same can be said for the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza who currently live in one big prison system. Our approach to criminal “justice” and our approach to foreign policy are intimately related and equally unjust. They are both based on authoritarian values and motivated by vengeance. And at the top, hiding behind high-minded “intellectual” arguments and/or appeals to vengeance, are a corrupt group of people whose real agenda is to profit from war (whether it be the “war” on “drugs,” or “crime” or “terror”).
Tags: US Politics, War Crimes