While the contempt for international law shown by the Bush administration is notable for its open defiance, it's hardly unprecedented. In fact, the United States has been torturing, assassinating, and illegally detaining foreign nationals for a very long time. If you haven't lived outside of the U.S., it's easy to get the impression that everyone believes the hype that's being pumped out by American media 24/7 about how the U.S. is the "last, best hope of the world," and a "beacon of freedom."
But that's a story very few people outside the U.S. are buying these days.
The fact is that while the debate over whether or not Obama should support prosecution of Bush/Cheney for permitting torture and abuse of prisoners, "extraordinary renditions," and the rest of it will be of some use in educating the American public to the dirty laundry that's accumulated over the past eight years, it's pretty clear that nothing at all will come of it in terms of serious legal consequences. Why? Because the only substantive difference between the questionable acts of the Bush administration and previous administrations is the openness with which they were undertaken.
Do you think no other administrations have misled the public into war? Google "Gulf of Tonkin" or "Sinking of the Maine." Think no other presidents supported and financed torture, illegal imprisonment and execution? Do some reading on the School of the Americas, where Latin American police and intelligence forces were (and continue to be) trained by American experts in how to torture prisoners and subvert legitimate organizations (like labor unions, the Catholic church, freely elected governments, etc.). Look into the Shah of Iran and his American-trained intelligence service, the overthrow and murder of Salvador Allende in Chile, and the CIA's destruction of the democratically-elected Arbenz government in Guatemala, which triggered a civil war that raged for decades and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents. When you're finished with those, look into Marcos in the Phillippines, and the sordid involvement of the U.S. in the Indonesian bloodbath in the 1970s (200,000 dead).
The fact is that the fairy tale version of America enacted by the despicable Kiefer Sutherland and the rest of people responsible for "24," is an unfunny joke to the rest of the world. The notion that America acts in defense of "freedom" as opposed to "American strategic and financial interests" has been a patent absurdity to everyone except the most tuned-out of Americans for a long time. Meaning no disrespect to the victims of 9/11 or their families, but how long can we whine about how much we've suffered with our 3,000 dead? It doesn't take much imagination to see how self-reverent our claims that "everything changed on 9/11" sound to people living in countries where far greater losses of innocent life are constant and unremarked by the world.
Obama (like Jimmy Carter before him) is certainly a breath of fresh air and a reminder that a decent human being can rise to the presidency, but also like Carter, he'll have blood on his hands in no time. There is simply no room for innocence in geo-politics.
