[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 33 (Thursday, February 28, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1379-S1381]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   JOHN SHATTUCK ON RESTORING THE RULE OF LAW IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I welcome this opportunity to commend to 
my colleagues a very thoughtful and informational article in the 
current issue of the American Prospect by former Assistant Secretary of 
State and Ambassador to the Czech Republic, John Shattuck, who 
currently serves as CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation.
  In his article, ``Healing Our Self-Inflicted Wounds,'' Mr. Shattuck 
makes the point that in the past few years America has seriously 
wounded itself in the eyes of the wider world by failing to live up to 
our highest ideals. Our policies have made it more difficult to enlist 
the support of our traditional allies in accomplishing our foreign 
policy goals and have emboldened those who do not share our goals to 
work harder to undermine them.
  Mr. Shattuck lays out several key steps for the next President to 
take to repair the damage done in the past 8 years and restore 
America's credibility--and strength--in the world. I believe his 
article will be of interest to all of us in Congress.
  And I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the 
Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

              [From The American Prospect, Jan.-Feb. 2008]

 Healing Our Self-Inflicted Wounds--How the Next President Can Restore 
     the Rule of Law to U.S. Foreign Policy--and Rebuild American 
                         Credibility and Power

                           (By John Shattuck)

       There's a remarkable paradox in the relationship today 
     between the United States and the rest of the world. Despite 
     economic and military assets unparalleled in history, U.S. 
     global influence and standing have hit rock bottom.
       As an economic superpower, the U.S. has a defense budget 
     that accounts for more than 40 percent of global military 
     spending. But this ``hard power'' does not necessarily 
     translate into real power. National-security failures abound, 
     from the catastrophic events in Iraq to the resurgence of 
     terrorist networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, from the 
     growing threat of civil war throughout the Middle East to the 
     deepening uncertainties of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, 
     from the standoff with Iran to the genocide in Darfur.
       The next president will have to address these crises by re-
     establishing America's capacity to lead. Doing so will 
     involve working to regain international credibility and 
     respect by reshaping American foreign policy to direct the 
     use of power within a framework of the rule of law.


                        THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM

       The United States may be strong economically and 
     militarily, but the rest of the world sees it as ineffective 
     and dangerous on the global stage. Less than a decade ago the 
     situation was quite different. A 1999 survey published by the 
     State Department Office of Research showed that large 
     majorities in France (62 percent), Germany (78 percent), 
     Indonesia (75 percent), Turkey (52 percent), among others, 
     held favorable opinions of the U.S.
       This positive climate of opinion fostered an outpouring of 
     international support immediately following the September 11 
     attacks. The U.S. was able to assemble a broad coalition with 
     U.N. approval to respond to the attacks and strike terrorist 
     strongholds in Afghanistan.
       Six years later global support for U.S. leadership has 
     evaporated. In poll after poll, international opinion of the 
     U.S. has turned sour. A January 2007 BBC survey found that 52 
     percent of the people polled in 18 countries around the world 
     had a ``mainly negative'' view of the U.S., with only 29 
     percent having a ``mainly positive'' view. In nearly all the 
     countries that had strong support for the U.S. in 1999 a big 
     downward shift of opinion had occurred by the end of 2006. In 
     France it was down to 39 percent, in Germany down to 37 
     percent, and in Indonesia down to 30 percent. A separate 
     survey conducted in 2006 by the Pew Research Center revealed 
     extremely hostile attitudes toward the U.S. throughout the 
     Arab and Muslim world: Egypt polled 70 percent negative, 
     Pakistan 73 percent, Jordan 85 percent, and Turkey 88 
     percent.
       A major factor driving this negative global opinion is the 
     way the U.S. has projected its power in the ``war on 
     terror.'' Four years after the Iraq invasion, U.S. military 
     presence in the Middle East was seen by 68 percent of those 
     polled by the BBC ``to provoke more conflict than it 
     prevents.'' Similarly, a poll published in April 2007 by the 
     Chicago Council on Global Affairs showed that in 13 of 15 
     countries, including Argentina, France, Russia, Indonesia, 
     India, and Australia, a majority of people agreed that ``the 
     U.S. cannot be trusted to act responsibly in the world.''
       The U.S. is now seen internationally to be a major violator 
     of human rights. The BBC poll showed that 67 percent of those 
     surveyed in 18 countries disapproved of the U.S. government's 
     handling of detainees in Guantanamo. A survey conducted in 
     June 2006 by coordinated polling organizations in Germany, 
     Great Britain, Poland, and India found that majorities or 
     pluralities in each country believed that the U.S. has 
     tortured terrorist detainees and disregarded international 
     treaties in its treatment of detainees, and that other 
     governments are wrong to cooperate with the U.S. in the 
     secret ``rendition'' of prisoners.
       These global opinion trends have reduced the capacity of 
     the United States to carry out its foreign policy and protect 
     national security. The perception of a growing gap between 
     the values the U.S. professes and the way it acts--
     particularly in regard to human rights and the rule of law--
     has eroded U.S. power and influence around the world.
       In his book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World 
     Politics, Joseph Nye analyzes a nation's ``ability to get 
     what [it] wants through attraction rather than coercion.'' 
     Soft power derives from ``the attractiveness of a nation's 
     culture, political ideals, and policies. When [its] policies 
     are seen as legitimate in the eyes of others, [its] soft 
     power is enhanced.'' Today, American political ideals have 
     lost much of their global attraction because their appeal has 
     been undermined by U.S. policies and actions that lack 
     legitimacy in the eyes of the world. American foreign policy 
     will continue to fail until the U.S. regains the 
     international respect it has lost.
       Fortunately, history shows that the capacity to lead can be 
     restored when U.S. values and policies are generally in 
     synch. During

[[Page S1380]]

     the first decade and a half of the Cold War, images of racism 
     and segregation in the United States undercut the ability of 
     the U.S. to project moral leadership. By the mid-1960s, 
     however, the civil-rights movement and the leadership of 
     Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had revived this vital 
     capacity.
       Similarly, following the disaster in Vietnam, a number of 
     U.S. foreign-policy successes were achieved through 
     bipartisan presidential leadership. President Ford signed the 
     Helsinki Accords, which led to international recognition for 
     the cause of human rights inside the Soviet bloc. President 
     Carter mobilized democratic governments to press for the 
     release of political prisoners held by repressive 
     governments. President Reagan signed the Convention Against 
     Torture and sent it to the Senate, where it was subsequently 
     ratified. President George H.W. Bush joined with Western 
     European governments to nurture the fledgling democracies of 
     post-Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. President Clinton 
     worked with NATO to end the human-rights catastrophe in 
     Bosnia and prevent genocide in Kosovo. Each of these foreign-
     policy successes was achieved by linking American interests 
     and values.
       Three fundamental principles govern the exercise of soft 
     power through the promotion of human rights and the rule of 
     law. The first is practicing what you preach. The U.S. loses 
     credibility when it charges others with violations it is 
     committing itself. It reduces its ability to lead when it 
     acts precipitously without international authority or the 
     support of other nations. The second is obeying the law. 
     Human rights are defined and protected by the U.S. 
     Constitution and by conventions and treaties that have been 
     ratified and incorporated into U.S. domestic law. The U.S. 
     must adhere to these legal obligations if it is to project 
     itself to other countries as a champion of human rights and 
     the rule of law. The third is supporting international 
     institutions. The U.S. should lead the way in reshaping 
     existing international institutions and creating new ones, 
     not attacking them, acting unilaterally, or turning its back 
     whenever it disagrees with what they do.
       The administration of President George W. Bush has 
     repeatedly violated each of these principles. It has opened 
     the U.S. to charges of hypocrisy by criticizing other 
     governments for acting outside the rule of law and committing 
     human-rights abuses it has committed itself. The annual 
     Country Reports on Human Rights Practices issued by the State 
     Department cover official actions such as ``torture and other 
     cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,'' 
     ``detention without charge,'' ``denial of fair public 
     trial,'' and ``arbitrary interference with privacy, family, 
     home, or correspondence.'' These are the very practices in 
     which the Bush administration itself has systematically 
     engaged, compelling readers of the State Department Country 
     Reports to conclude that the U.S. does not practice what it 
     preaches. The 2006 report on Egypt, for example, criticizes 
     the fact that Egyptian police and security forces ``detained 
     hundreds of individuals without charge,'' that ``abuse of 
     prisoners and detainees by police, security personnel and 
     prison guards remained common,'' and that ``the [Egyptian] 
     Emergency Law empowers the government to place wiretaps--
     without warrants.'' These same criticisms apply to the 
     United States.
       The Bush administration has diminished a second source of 
     soft power by flaunting basic requirements of international 
     and domestic law. These include the Geneva Conventions, the 
     Convention Against Torture, and the International Convent on 
     Civil and Political Rights, and the Foreign Intelligence 
     Surveillance Act. The result has been the creation of ``law-
     free zones'' in which foreign detainees in U.S. custody 
     overseas have been brutally abused, thousands of foreign 
     citizens have been held indefinitely as ``unlawful 
     combatants'' without being accorded the status of prisoners 
     of war, and repressive regimes around the world have 
     implicitly been given the green light to crack down on 
     political dissidents and religious and ethnic minorities in 
     the name of fighting terrorism.
       The administration's history of disregard for the 
     established framework of international law was made clear by 
     a 2002 memorandum, prepared by the then-White House counsel, 
     Alberto Gonzales, proclaiming that ``terrorism renders 
     obsolete the Geneva Conventions' strict limitations on the 
     questioning of prisoners.'' No recent president had 
     questioned the basic rules of international humanitarian law 
     in times of war. The administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson, 
     Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford during the Vietnam War, and 
     George H.W. Bush during the Gulf War, all adhered to the 
     Geneva requirements. The reasons were spelled out in a 2002 
     memorandum by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, 
     challenging the Gonzales memo. Powell warned that the White 
     House interpretation of the Geneva Conventions would 
     ``reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice, 
     undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops, 
     and [provoke] negative international reaction, with immediate 
     adverse consequences for our conduct of foreign policy.''
       A third source of soft power has been undermined by the 
     Bush administration's attacks on and disengagement from 
     international human-rights institutions. The U.S. has been a 
     world leader in building these institutions since the time 
     when Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the international committee 
     that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 
     current administration has renounced that leadership by 
     refusing to run for a seat on the new U.N. Human Rights 
     Council and by undermining efforts to shape the new 
     International Criminal Court (ICC). Both institutions are 
     flawed, but as a result of the administration's disengagement 
     the U.S. now has no influence over their future development.


                     UNDERCUTTING NATIONAL SECURITY

       The Bush administration's record on human rights and the 
     rule of law has undercut the capacity of the U.S. to achieve 
     important foreign-policy goals. The erosion of America's soft 
     power has made it more difficult for the U.S. to succeed in 
     preventing or containing threats of terrorism, genocide, and 
     nuclear proliferation. The denigration of American values has 
     made the U.S. ineffective in promoting human rights and 
     democracy. Indeed, the current administration's frequent 
     disregard of the rule of law has jeopardized five frequently 
     stated foreign-policy objectives.
       The first is countering the threats posed by Iraq, Iran, 
     and Afghanistan. For more than a decade these countries have 
     topped the United States' list of dangers to international 
     security. Strategies to reduce the violence and terrorism in 
     Iraq and Afghanistan and to prevent Iran from exporting 
     terrorism and acquiring nuclear weapons require a mixture of 
     hard and soft power. But reports of CIA and U.S. military 
     torture and mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other 
     secret prisons in the region may have weakened the ability of 
     the U.S. to counter the deterioration of human-rights 
     conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Similarly, State 
     Department criticism of the Iranian regime's political 
     repression has been blunted by the U.S. record of detainee 
     abuse and illegal electronic surveillance. Years after the 
     U.S. military interventions, Iraq and Afghanistan remain 
     major exporters of terrorism and centers of human-rights 
     abuse. Iran is a major terrorist exporter and a human-rights 
     disaster.
       A second major stated objective of U.S. foreign policy is 
     preventing genocide. The lesson of Rwanda was that the cost 
     of failing to stop genocide is not only a massive killing of 
     innocent civilians but also an ongoing humanitarian 
     catastrophe and long-term regional instability. Following the 
     Rwanda genocide, a doctrine of humanitarian intervention was 
     developed under U.S. leadership and invoked, with broad 
     international support and authority under the Genocide 
     Convention, to end the genocide in Bosnia in 1995, and then 
     to prevent a genocide in Kosovo in 1999. Today, that doctrine 
     is in shambles, undermined and discredited by the Bush 
     administration's intervention in Iraq. As a result, the U.S. 
     has been unable to mobilize support to stop the ongoing 
     genocide in Darfur and an entire region of Africa has been 
     destabilized.
       Addressing the challenges posed by geopolitical rivals such 
     as China, Russia, and Cuba is a third long-standing concern 
     of U.S. foreign policy. The Bush record has made already-
     complicated interactions with these countries even more 
     difficult. China is leading the way in effectively exploiting 
     the growing global perception that the U.S. is a human-rights 
     violator. For several years the Chinese government has 
     produced and publicized its own report on U.S. human-rights 
     failings in an attempt to counter U.S. criticism of China's 
     record. China's March 2007 report was particularly blunt: 
     ``We urge the U.S. government to acknowledge its own human 
     rights problems and stop interfering in other countries' 
     internal affairs under the pretext of human rights.'' Russian 
     President Vladimir Putin has been similarly direct in 
     rejecting recent U.S. criticism of the Russian government's 
     press censorship, and Cuba has been quick to point to the 
     U.S. record of detainee abuse at Guantanamo whenever Cuban 
     human-rights practices are challenged by the U.S. The Bush 
     administration has provided China, Russia, and Cuba with a 
     convenient excuse for cracking down on dissidents and 
     minorities under the guise of fighting terrorism within their 
     borders.
       Creating and managing strategic alliances is a fourth major 
     U.S. foreign-policy objective. The Bush administration's 
     record on human rights and the rule of law has alienated 
     traditional democratic allies and complicated relations with 
     authoritarian countries. The Council of Europe, a 
     parliamentary assembly of elected representatives from across 
     the continent, has condemned European governments for 
     cooperating with the U.S. in running secret detention 
     centers, and has called for Europe to distance itself from 
     the Bush administration's tactics in the ``war on terror.'' 
     Negative European opinion about U.S. human-rights practices 
     has made it politically difficult for European leaders to 
     support U.S. positions on other issues. And by condoning 
     torture, prisoner abuse, secret detention, illegal 
     surveillance, and other violations of human rights, the 
     administration has also undercut its ability to promote 
     reform with authoritarian allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, 
     Morocco, and Uzbekistan.
       Finally, holding accountable those who commit human-rights 
     crimes has been a bedrock objective of U.S. foreign policy 
     since the Nuremberg trials following World War II. The U.S. 
     has long been at the forefront of efforts to create a system 
     of international justice, most recently in the establishment 
     of the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former 
     Yugoslavia and Rwanda. By opposing the International Criminal 
     Court, the Bush administration has relinquished its 
     leadership on these issues. The indispensability of

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     international justice to U.S. foreign policy is illustrated 
     by the administration's retreat in 2006 from outright 
     opposition to the ICC to reluctant acceptance of the U.N. 
     Security Council's referral of the Darfur genocide case to 
     ICC jurisdiction. But this begrudging exception unfortunately 
     proves the rule.


                          REPAIRING THE DAMAGE

       The next president must make repairing the damage to 
     American values and moral authority a top priority. Acting 
     within a framework of the rule of law and respect for human 
     rights will be essential to restoring America's international 
     leadership.
       The U.S. must strengthen its alliances by demonstrating it 
     adheres to international norms in pursuing its national-
     security objectives. The next president should immediately 
     announce that the U.S. will close the detention center at 
     Guantanamo and transfer detainees to the U.S. or 
     detainees' home countries. In addition, the president 
     should announce that the U.S. is bound by the Geneva 
     Conventions as a matter of law and policy. Restoring the 
     U.S. policy of providing individualized status hearings to 
     detainees would demonstrate respect for international 
     norms without restricting the government's capacity to 
     conduct lawful interrogations to obtain intelligence 
     information about terrorist activities. Fully applying the 
     Geneva Conventions also would not preclude the U.S. from 
     trying detainees in military commissions.
       A second means of underscoring U.S. commitment to address 
     national-security threats within the rule of law would be to 
     provide assistance to other countries for counterterrorism 
     operations that comply with basic human-rights standards. 
     ``Fighting terror'' has become a convenient excuse for 
     repressive regimes to engage in further repression, often 
     inspiring further terrorism in an increasing cycle of 
     violence. To break this cycle, the U.S. should provide 
     assistance and training to foreign military and law 
     enforcement personnel in methods of fighting terrorism within 
     the rule of law.
       The U.S. should take the lead in drafting a comprehensive 
     treaty defining and condemning terrorism within a framework 
     of human rights. Working toward a consensus on this global 
     issue would help counter the claim that differences in 
     cultural values, religious beliefs, political philosophies, 
     or justifiable ends make it impossible to define the crime of 
     terrorism.
       The president should make clear that the U.S. is prepared 
     once again to be an active participant in strengthening the 
     system of international law it helped create over the last 
     half century. Important treaties have lingered for years in 
     the Senate and should now be ratified or renegotiated. Some 
     were signed by Republican presidents and once enjoyed 
     bipartisan support, but have been blocked for the last seven 
     years by the current administration and its Senate 
     supporters. The U.S. should also rejoin negotiations on such 
     critical issues as human rights, international justice, 
     climate change, and nonproliferation of weapons of mass 
     destruction. By doing so, the next president would 
     demonstrate that globalization can be made to work within the 
     rule of law.
       The U.S. should support those seeking to promote the rule 
     of law, democracy, and human rights in their own countries. 
     Democracy and human-rights activists are the shock troops in 
     the struggle against terrorism, genocide, and nuclear 
     proliferation. But democracy can never be delivered through 
     the barrel of a gun. Assistance to those who are working to 
     build their own democratic societies must be carefully 
     planned and targeted, sustained over time, and based on a 
     thorough understanding of the unique circumstances and 
     profound differences among cultures, religions, and 
     countries. A new U.S. government must work within an 
     international framework, not unilaterally and preemptively, 
     to assist those struggling around the world to bring human 
     rights to their own societies.
       Finally, the U.S. should join with other countries, 
     alliances, and international organizations to reassert 
     America's role in working to prevent or stop genocide and 
     crimes against humanity. The president should invoke the 
     doctrine of humanitarian intervention that was applied in 
     Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s to address the genocide in 
     Darfur. Extensive diplomatic and economic tools can be used 
     to head off an impending genocide, but international military 
     intervention remains available under international law if all 
     other avenues have been exhausted.
       By recommitting the U.S. to a foreign policy conducted 
     within a framework of human rights and the rule of law, the 
     next president can restore America's moral leadership in the 
     world--and by so doing, enhance American power and security.

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