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Pretty dumb article pretending a legal adviser will set international policy.
The suicide of American sovereignty
Tuesday, 31st March 2009
As London locks down in feverish anticipation of the arrival of The One,Commentary publishes an important essay by John Bolton on an academic paper articulating what he correctly perceives to be the underlying rationale for Obama’s foreign policy – nothing less than the ending of American sovereignty.
The progressive classes in Britain and Europe have signed up to this idea for years. Dubbed ‘transnational progressivism’, it is based on the belief that the nation state is in and of itself the cause of all the ills of the world, from prejudice to war. Nations cause nationalism; nationalism causes conflict; abolish nations and you abolish conflict and usher in the brotherhood of man. War is replaced by diplomacy, and transnational ins utions and values trump national ones. It’s the rationale behind the European Union; it accounts for the near religious veneration of the UN as the supreme global arbiter of international legitimacy and ethics; it explains the enthusiasm for supra-national ins utions such as the International Criminal Court, the obeisance to ‘international law’ and the supremacy of ‘universal’ human rights law.
Unfortunately, this latest formula for Utopia is wholly inimical to democracy, actively undermines or prevents countries from acting in their own national self-interest to defend their own citizens, ins utionalises deliberately mediated injustice and even terror through appeasement policies instead of ‘just wars’ against tyranny and aggression, and is a recipe for more conflict rather than less as the people progressively rise up against this erosion of their powers of representative self-government.
A large part of Obama’s appeal to the intelligentsia in Britain and Europe is precisely the understanding that he stands for the repudiation of American exceptionalism and the so-much resented swaggering imposition of American values (aka freedom and diplomacy) through military might abroad in favour of a Europeanised, multilateral diplomacy-based approach. Bolton points out that this approach has its distinct limitations, over and above eroding sovereignty by subordinating it to other people's interests:
The difference arises in the consideration of a tiny number of cases—cases that prove entirely resistant to diplomatic efforts, in which divergent national interests prove implacably resistant to reconciliation. If diplomacy does not and cannot work, the continued application of it to a problematic situation is akin to subjecting a cancer patient to a regimen of chemotherapy that shows no results whatever. The result may look like treatment, but it is, in fact, only making the patient sicker and offering no possibility of improvement.He’s talking about Iran.
... Time is one of the most important variables in a diplomatic dance, because it often imposes a cost on one side and a benefit to its adversary. Nations can use the time granted by a diplomatic process to obscure their objectives, build alliances, prepare operationally for war, and, especially today, accelerate their efforts to build weapons of mass destruction and the ballistic missiles that might carry them.
Meanwhile, Obama has picked for a high-ranking post in his administration yet another official who appears to embody values an hetical to American interests --including American sovereignty. The New York Post reports that he has nominated Harold Koh, until recently Dean of Yale Law School, to be the State Department’s legal adviser – in which role he would forge a wide range of international agreements and help represent the US in such places as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice:
It's a job where you want a strong defender of America's sovereignty. But that's not Koh. He’s a fan of ‘transnational legal process,’ arguing that the distinctions between US and international law should vanish.Get that – the man Obama wants to be a top law officer has equated the US with North Korea and Iraq as flouters of international law, and sees no problem in sharia being used to settle American law suits.
...The primacy of international legal ‘norms’ applies even to treaties we reject. For example, Koh believes that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child -- a problematic do ent that we haven’t ratified -- should dictate the age at which individual US states can execute criminals. Got that? On issues ranging from affirmative action to the interrogation of terrorists, what the rest of the world says, goes.
Including, apparently, the world of radical imams. A New York lawyer, Steven Stein, says that, in addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, Koh claimed that ‘in an appropriate case, he didn’t see any reason why sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.’
A spokeswoman for Koh said she couldn’t confirm the incident, responding: ‘I had heard that some guy . . . had asked a question about sharia law, and that Dean Koh had said something about that while there are obvious differences among the many different legal systems, they also share some common legal concepts.’
... Koh has called America’s focus on the War on Terror ‘obsessive.’ In 2004, he listed countries that flagrantly disregard international law – ‘most prominently, North Korea, Iraq, and our own country, the United States of America,’ which he branded ‘the axis of disobedience.’
The destruction of US sovereignty and legal and cultural integrity at home and the appeasement of tyrants abroad by a President who holds his own nation in such contempt that he wants to emasculate its powers of self-government and grovel to its mortal enemies – it’s certainly change, all right, but whether such a national suicide programme is one that Americans can actually believe in is quite another matter.
Pretty dumb article pretending a legal adviser will set international policy.
reason?
The legal adviser will not set international policy.
Who wrote the article? Link?
Bah. If liberalism and liberals were as deadly to the country as advertised our republic would have perished 40 years ago.
Let Bolton hunker down if he's so scared. Or call 911. Or go start a militia. Whining like a baby in Commentary that liberals are ruining everything won't win many new converts.
Some woman in a country that is a member of the big, bad ICC.
Gonna get you!
Please tell me what parts of our sovereignty we are giving up?
Then can anyone tell me why, if we constantly criticise North Korea or Iran for not living up to their international treaties, or standards of treaties they haven't signed, we have moral authority if we still retain the rights to use some of the more nasty land mines and cluster bombs?
The problem with Bolton and many on the right is that they don't see the hypocrisy inherent in many of their positions, and although they have ideological blinders on, others don't.
That hypocrisy cost us dearly.
When will the conservatives run to the hills and satrt their own colonies? Hurry up already..
I can't decide which is funnier, the fact that the author thinks that American sovereignty is defined by the imposition of American "values" through military means abroad, or that he argues that the use of diplomacy undermines the American value of using diplomacy.
They do. The losers chase them like lawyers to an ambulance so they can continue to tax the achievers to fund their dumb policies. Keep an eye on the exodus out of New York.
Liberals are just as forceful as the neocons. The only difference is they have indoctrinated enough people to drape their tactics in political correctness and manipulation of the ignorants' good intentions.
Last edited by LockBeard; 04-01-2009 at 09:49 AM.
so, it was good intentions that caused this mess?
good to know.
Please don't criticize our Lord and savior, Obama.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one that noticed that little gem.
I found it waaay ironic that a John Bolton of all people was ing about the use of diplomacy undermining the American value of diplomacy.
Did he even bother reading what he wrote?
It has long been my impression that people like Bolton couldn't put together a logically consistant policy to save their lives, and this didn't help.
Input data, output predictable diatribe.
Your pink slip will be in the mail shortly. We have written a program that will offer a selection of pre-written responses blaming liberals and socialists for items such as this, and no longer require your services.
Please pick up your things on the way out the door, and hand your key to the nice security guard on your way out.
I don't really agree with the premise of the article, but it does appear that foreign policy is not a high priority for this admin.
Thanks for letting us know money is more important than people to you.
Your rampant, shallow materialism is part of the American illness.
" you, I've got mine" as a rallying cry.
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