Thursday, October 13, 2011
Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for labeling U.S. outrage over an alleged plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. on American soil a double-standard.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced Tuesday that federal authorities had foiled a plot backed by the Iranian government to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States on American soil. Two men, one of whom is apparently a member of a special operations unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, were charged in federal court in New York on Tuesday. Holder called the bomb plot a flagrant violation of U.S. and international law. And Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said, “We will not let other countries use our soil as their battleground.”
But wait a minute. Two weeks ago, the United States assassinated one of its enemies in Yemen, on Yemeni soil. If the U.S. believes it has the right to assassinate enemies like Anwar Awlaki anywhere in the world in the name of a “war on terror” that has no geographical limitation, how can it then argue that other nations don’t have a similar right to track down their enemies and kill them wherever they’re found?
It’s true that the assassination of Awlaki was carried out with the cooperation of the government of Yemen. That makes a difference. But would the U.S. have hesitated to kill him if Yemen had not approved? Remember: There was no cooperation from the Pakistani government when Osama bin Laden was killed in May.
As the United States continues down the path of state-sponsored assassination far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, all sorts of tricky moral questions are likely to arise. But this much is clear: The world is unlikely to accept that the United States has a right to behave as it wishes without accountability all around the globe and that other nations do not.
This piece almost makes me have faith again in the mainstream media.
From the Left 
I actually wrote about this ‘double standard’ on the New York Times yesterday, pointing out that our hypocritical Gov’t has been doing this very same thing for many years…….. Anyone remember when we killed President Diem, in 1963 to start the disastrous Viet Nam war???? Huh?
Yes………. and I’m also old enough to remember when in the 1950’s, our ”Dumbocratic” Governemnt randomly killed Politicians all over South America so that we could install our own ‘Puppet Dictators’ to rule those countries for our own Benifit…… Who the Heck do we think we’re fooling???
Is this what conservatives mean by “American exceptionalism?
I’m very surprised to see a piece like this in a mainstream, print newspaper calling out the U.S. on its bullshit. This type of thing, holding an administration to the same standard it expects from the rest of the world is unheard of today.
The entire U.S. foreign policy is predicated on double standards.
Thanks to the Los Angeles Times for pointing this out and thank you, Christopher, for blogging this subject. More people need to understand that successful foreign policy is not a one way street.
Wow! This from the LA Times? I don’t know what to say.