The Hypocrisy of American Exceptionalism

On December 9, 2011, President Obama issued a Presidential Proclamation on the occasion of the anniversary of the United Nation’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.  That proclamation is an appalling example of the blatant hypocrisy of American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States of America is not bound by international law, that it can do whatever it wants in the world, and that whatever the United States does is good because it is the United States that does it.  In that Proclamation Obama said:  “All people should live free from the threat of extrajudicial killing, torture, oppression, and discrimination….”  I will not quarrel here with Obama’s statement that all people should live free from discrimination, but I cannot see how Obama can claim to support the proposition that all people should live free from the threat of extrajudicial killing, torture, and oppression with a straight face. 

There simply is no doubt that the Obama Administration has engaged in “extrajudicial killing.”  The most famous case is Osama bin Ladn.  President Obama sent a highly trained unit of Navy SEALS into Pakistan under orders to kill bin Ladn.  Not to capture him.  Not to bring him before a court where justice could be done.  To kill him.  Yes, bin Ladn was a terrorist.  Yes, the United States had legitimate claims against bin Ladn; and bin Ladn surely would have been convicted of crimes against humanity and of murder in almost any court in the world.  The point is not that bin Ladn wasn’t a criminal.  He was, of the worst sort.  The point is that President Obama chose to deal with him by using “extrajudicial killing,” a violation of internationally recognized human rights that Obama claims to condemn in his recent Proclamation.

Some might argue that bin Ladn was not a citizen of the United States, was a declared enemy of the United States, and that Obama’s action against him was therefore not “extrajudicial killing” within the meaning of Obama’s Proclamation but an act of war.  Assassination has always been distinguished from war, but we need not argue this point for our claim that Obama is a hypocrite to stand.  President Obama has also ordered executions that clearly constitute extrajudicial killing.  He has order the extrajudicial killing even of American citizens, people we have always believed were entitled to the Constitutional protection of due process of law.  He ordered the targeted killings of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samr Kahn, both of them American citizens.  They may both have been guilty of crimes under American and international law, but that is not the point.  The point is that they were never convicted of anything through any judicial process, American, international, or otherwise.  Their killing by forces of the United States under the command of President Obama was therefore precisely extrajudicial killing.

Then there is the question of torture.  We know that operatives of the United States government, including members of the armed forces, committed numerous acts of torture under President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.  Cheney, who should be on trial in The Hague for having authorized torture but never will be because he is an American, continues to advocate and justify the use of interrogation measures that have been branded as torture and therefore banned under international law for a very long time.  Yet the use of torture by representatives of the United States has not ended under President Obama.  It seems well-established that Americans have committed acts of torture against detainees in Afghanistan.  It seems probable that they have continued to commit acts of torture against detainees at the prison at Guantanamo Bay.  Obama says all people should be free from torture while he presides over a government that commits acts of torture and that, even if it did not, has done nothing to bring to justice people in the prior administration who advocated, authorized, ordered, and committed such acts.

Then we come to oppression.  Oppression is a vague term, and it is not clear what Obama means by it in his Proclamation.  Yet it seems clear that the United States oppresses the people it holds in limitless detention at Guantanamo Bay, many without trial, some after they have been cleared for release.  Our illegal invasion of Iraq resulted in the deaths of an unknown number of Iraqi people, an number that easily runs to tens upon tens of thousands at least.  If our actions that led to all of those deaths don’t constitute oppression of the Iraqi people, I don’t know what does.  Yes, President Obama has now declared the Iraq war to be over, but he had been president for close to three years before that declaration.  How many Iraqis died on his watch?  We have no way of knowing, but it cannot be a small number.  Obama continued the American military oppression of Iraq for many months after he became president.
Beyond that reality it is undeniable that the United States has long supported oppressive regimes in South America, the Middle East, and elsewhere when we have thought that those regimes acted more in our interests than would their democratically-inclined opponents, opponents we usually branded as socialists or Communists and did everything we could to defeat.  We continue to support the horribly oppressive regime in Saudi Arabia.  (After all, it sits atop a lot of oil.)  We supported the brutally oppressive Mubarak regime in Egypt until it became clear that that regime would not survive the awakened indignation of the Egyptian people.  The United States government cannot claim to have opposed oppression without engaging in an transparent act of hypocrisy.

There is only one possible conclusion from these facts.  When Obama says that “all people should live free from the threat of extrajudicial killing, torture, oppression…,”  he means that all people should live free from those violations of their human rights unless those violations are committed by the United States of America.  He can’t possibly mean anything else given his well-documented actions as President of the United States.  Yet of course he doesn’t issue a proclamation that expresses that meaning.  He issues one with a blanket condemnation of human rights violations.  Because he doesn’t issue a proclamation that says what he really means, that reflects the reality of American policy and actions,  he adds hypocrisy to his long list of wrongful actions. 

Obama campaigned on a promise of “change we can believe in,” but he has embraced American exceptionalism with at least as much enthusiasm as his predecessor; and every bit as much as his predecessor he is a hypocrite about it.  American exceptionalism is always hypocritical.  It has to be because the American people expect their leaders to claim to be champions of peace, justice, democracy, and human rights regardless of the reality of their actions.  That we are always champions of peace, justice, democracy, and human rights is one of the great American myths, one of the stories we tell to connect the people to the policies of the government.  Some Americans see that our actions belie our idealistic words and that they have done so for a very long time, but most do not.  Some Americans can see through the hypocrisy of things like Obama’s recent proclamation, but most cannot.  Until more of us can and do see through the hypocrisy, American exceptionalism will continue to be the controlling doctrine of American policy.  Until more of us can and do see through the hypocrisy our country will continue at every turn to violate the human rights for which we claim to stand.