Both sides now

Here's a snatch of conversation involving Stephen Sackur and Justin Webb, from Radio 4's 'Correspondents Look Ahead', broadcast on 30 December. (The excerpt is 28 minutes in.)

Sackur: One fascinating insight into human rights attitudes round the world I had in recent weeks was chatting to Mary Robinson who till very recently was the UN chief running the Human Rights Commission. She said the problem is that, because of what has happened, post-Iraq in particular, with Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, a whole host of other things she listed, it is impossible now for countries like America which basically are democracies, which many people around the world have always looked up to - the problem is now they cannot take the moral high ground and lecture other countries on how they should impose human rights values. It doesn't work any more...

Webb: That's absolutely ludicrous, though, isn't it? I mean the view in America of that kind of comment is just to throw your hands up and say 'For goodness sake...' Look at the facts on the ground, look at the way that Iraq was run before the invasion, look at Iran now, and then look, for instance, at America. I mean, can you seriously say that there is some kind of moral equivalence between the way they treat their own people and the way Americans treat theirs, the way they behave on the world stage...?

Sackur: Justin, hang on, it's all about perception...

Webb: Ah, that's a different matter... Someone in the position that Mary Robinson is in, where it shouldn't be just about perception, it should be about a knowledge of the facts on the ground - that kind of thing is what so annoys people in this country, and not just Republicans, Americans of all political stripes, who just say to the rest of the world, 'For goodness sake: look at us without your soft anti-Americanism, or your dislike of McDonalds or whatever else, or your dislike of big people, powerful people, successful people... just look at the facts on the ground.' America is a very very free country...

Relevant to this exchange is a piece by Peter Beinart in TNR Online (via Jonathan Derbyshire):

[W]hy should our horror at September 11 mitigate our horror at U.S. torture? Liberals have the right to measure the Bush administration against our vision of America, not merely against the reality of America's enemies. Judging the United States by the standards of Al Qaeda - like judging the United States by the standards of the Soviet Union during the cold war - makes it far too easy to absolve our government's sins. Joseph McCarthy was far better than Josef Stalin, but he was still a menace. Richard Nixon was far better than Leonid Brezhnev, but he still deserved to be impeached.

Yet, if [Senator Joe] Lieberman's view is one-dimensional, so is that of his critics. If he only sees Bush through the prism of war, they only see the war through the prism of Bush - which is why they can muster so little anger at America's jihadist enemies and so little enthusiasm when Iraqis risk their lives to vote... Whatever brings Democrats closer to power, ipso facto, makes the United States safer. That would be nice if it were true - but it's clearly not, because, sometimes, Bush is right, and because, to some degree, our safety depends on his success...

What both Lieberman and the Lieberman-haters have lost is what the great social democratic critic Irving Howe called "two-sided politics." Liberals are engaged in two different struggles - one against illiberalism at home, the other against an even more profound illiberalism abroad. Both must be fought with passion. Neither can be subsumed.