Monday, March 26, 2007
My whereabouts
Saturday night I flew to Zurich with a final destination of Tuttlingen, Germany. Tuttlingen is the surgical instrument capital of the universe, a town of 35,000 people that is home to around 300 companies, large and small, that design and manufacture high grade surgical instruments. Stories and pictures will follow.
Blogging has been light and will probably remain so for a couple of days, insofar as my hotel -- while quaint and delightful on the right bank of the Danube -- is extremely "local" and does not offer internet access. I have managed to roam my way into a T-Mobile hotspot at exorbitant cost, but do not expect to hear much from me unless I can grab some better bandwidth later in the day.
Tuesday night I'll be back in Zurich, where (presumably) my blogging will return to its former glory.
Meanwhile, read Wretchard (via Glenn Reynolds) on the world's asymmetrical application of the Geneva Conventions.
As currently interpreted the Geneva Conventions only apply to individuals bent on destroying America. Individuals who blow up elementary schools, kidnap children, attack churches and mosques, kill invalids in wheelchairs, plan attacks on skyscrapers in New York, behead journalists, detonate car bombs with children to camouflage their crime, or board jetliners with explosive shoes -- all while wearing mufti or even women's clothing -- these are all considered "freedom fighters" of the most principled kind. They and they alone enjoy the protections of the Geneva Convention. As to Americans like Tucker and Menchaca or Israeli Gilad Shalit -- or these fifteen British sailors for that matter, it is a case of "what Geneva Convention?" We don't need no steenkin' Geneva Convention to try these guys as spies. That's the way the Human Rights racket works. Don't go looking for any Geneva Convention in Somalia, Darfur, Basilan or Iran. Try Guantanamo Bay.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record in this subject, it seems to me that there are two possible reasons that the Western chattering classes -- including huge swaths of the NGO activist class and the international media -- do not hold Iran or any other of these disgusting places to the same standard as the United States. Perhaps they have such an abiding respect for the United States that they are disappointed when they perceive it to have failed to live up to standards that no other similarly situated country in the world has ever sustained. Alternatively, perhaps they have so little regard for Iran, most of the Arab world and virtually all of sub-Saharan Africa that it does not even occur to them to be outraged when these countries announce their violations international law.
Is there a third explanation that explains this double standard (other than, of course, unreconstructed anti-Americanism)?
5 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Mar 26, 05:46:00 AM:
I know the feeling. I am in a small hotel in Nurnberg, and while it is mostly quaint and wonderful, I rather miss the internet access.
By , at
Mon Mar 26, 09:05:00 AM:
Fear. They are afraid of insulting the thugs and gangsters of the third world. As much as many of them loathe the US, they don't fear gangster treatment from our government against them.
I recently read Michael Durant's book about his Army career and specifically his experiences in Somalia (he was the 'copter pilot that survived "Blackhawk Down"). While being held by the Somalis (with a broken leg and back), a Swiss women with the Red Cross visited him (She was incredibly brave for doing so). If the NGO's start calling people like the Somalis or Iranians on their human rights violations, that brave and heroic Red Cross lady would have been....well, imagine the worst.
By , at
Tue Mar 27, 03:18:00 AM:
I think the third explanation is possibly a combination of misinterpretation of the Geneva Conventions, careful selection of evidence, lack of exposure to the media and a tendency towards strawman arguments on the part of those other blogs.
As some people on those other blogs have pointed out, it's not entirely clear if it's a breach of the Geneva Conventions, since a state of war does not exist between the UK and Iran. Knowing what I know about the ICRC, they are probably already trying to get access to those soldiers in order to make sure of their rights; it's just that they don't publicise the details of those prison visits, particularly when they're still negotiating. (Their approach to Guantanamo was different, and many within the ICRC disagreed with it; the decision to be more public was made on the basis that the rights of the prisoners would be better served by a higher-visibility approach without additional risk to the prisoners themselves.)
I think you're absolutely right about the disappointment, though; that's how I feel. The USA is founded on such great principles, and many of us see those principles being daily eroded. I think what worries us the most is that other countries will look at the US, and say "look, if this country which is so rich, and so powerful, and so democratic, can't manage to uphold these laws, then why should we?"
By , at
Tue Mar 27, 03:19:00 AM:
Clarification: "careful selection of evidence, lack of exposure to the media"
should read
"careful selection of evidence and/or lack of exposure to the media"
By 
Georg Felis, at
Wed Mar 28, 10:49:00 AM:
I would go more with “Familiarity breeds contempt”. These (censored adjective) people have never been Mugged By Reality, they live here in an ocean of freedom that they take for granted, and see only the bad things in their own society. Iran and such countries are far away, pretty pictures in magazines or quaint little tourist traps that they visit while staying in expensive hotels and drinking bottled water. (I don’t mean you TH, but I bet there are a couple in your hotel)
There’s also an element of “It’s somebody else’s fault” in there, a normal delusion of the Left, for every earthquake, tidal wave, drought, or tsunami there must be somebody to blame, and naturally they blame the U.S. as the Most Logical Suspect. You see, it is so *Easy* to blame somebody else. And that is always the lure of the Left. The War is going badly, we must run away. Global warming is destroying the earth, tax those big companies to pay for…something. My child is not learning in school, we must change the textbooks (again) and teaching theory (again), never mind the wealth of video games in his room. There is poverty in the world, we must give more of your money to the Government, they will fix it. I see an Injustice, we must pass a Law!
I confess, my children are like that. If there is an empty plate in the living room, they will all swear it wandered out there by itself, none of them did it, no way, and they don’t want to take it back to the kitchen, its somebody else’s responsibility. (Guess who?) Slowly, I am changing them to take responsibility for their actions, to take action to fix things even when they may not have been “It”. If they can do it, perhaps even the modern Liberal can even be retrained.
