But I still maintain that if we are serious about stopping the US war machine, we have to focus on post 9/11 US military doctrine, in particular the claim of a right to intervene preventively (not simply pre-emptively) if any regime deemed rogue begins or cannot be trust to forgo a build up of WMD capacity. It is my guess that this new doctrine, coupled with Carter's old Persian Gulf doctrine about the use of force to protect oil supplies, is hugely popular in the US even though it has lead to the devastation of Iraq, and it is easier to make a case against human rights imperialism given Americans' proud identification of themselves as Americans uber alles and related cultural insularity than it is to argue against the "prevention" and Carter doctrines. This is the peace movement's task however and we need real expertise in international relations (I am drawing on Prem Shankar Jha's Twilight of the Nation State). Which no one on this list seems to have. I certainly don't.
Human rights imperialism, invoked in Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq, has come to a castastrophic end in Iraq. The dominant ideology is one of security without freedom, much less utopia.
As for the moral superiority of the West, well many of my posts have spoken indirectly to this. I suggest that we continue the critique of liberalism (its veiled collective form of exploitation and its hidden connections to its own gulags and camps), express skepticism about the spectacle of elections in which corporations enjoy rights of free speech, remind ourselves of the West's foundation in slavery, colonialism and enclosures. And after Abu Ghraib this should not be difficult.
ARZOO OSANLOO University of Washington Islamico-civil "rights talk": Women, subjectivity, and law in Iranian family court American Ethnologist Volume 33 Number 2 May 2006
A B S T R A C T Soon after the 1979 Iranian revolution, women's appeals for equal protection of their rights were deemed by supporters of the new government to be remnants of European-U.S. imperialism. Over two decades later, Iranian women are at the vanguard of reform, calling for their civil rights once again. Now, with republican ideals authenticated by Islam through Iran's innovative state, an Islamic republic, women push for tangible procedural process in reformulated Islamico-civil family courts that position them as individual rights-bearing citizens. [rights talk, women, Islam, divorce, subjectivity, law]
The Measure of Mercy: Islamic Justice, Sovereign Power, and Human Rights in Iran Arzoo Osanloo University of Washington CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, 2006 (on an essay about mercy shown to a juvenile who had killed an agent of the moral police in a street fight; the mercy was extended by the victim's family--rb)
Conclusion The Islamic Republic of Iran simultaneously mobilizes multiple modes of power in an effort to show how it is authentic and global, modern and Islamic, and perhaps most important, merciful and just. A highly charged story about a stay of execution became a performance of penal justice and a statement on the human rights practices of the Iranian state. By describing how this case became a human rights event and examining its fallout from the perspectives of state representatives and citizens, I have sought to engage the performative and productive aspects of human rights. Drawing on Foucault and Agamben, I suggest that the spectacular performance of Islamic penal justice is an exertion of state power that lends greater credence to the authority of a modern state. Many of those I talked to in the course of my research attributed the reprieve to a state position on human rights even if this is not as apparent in practice. My aim is to address the constructed nature of human rights and to examine what both state and nonstate actors see to be at stake in possessing human rights (i.e., legitimacy in the global culture). Official statements on Islamic human rights
also disclose a blending of Islam, liberal governance, and discourses of rights. State representatives made use of the debates over this case to express a position on human rights. They wished to demonstrate how civilized their policies were, while at the same time particularizing human rights as native, in that they are rooted in the concept of mercy. In this respect, state forces joined the international community by assenting to a limit on sovereignty, but they did so by locating an authentic Islamic position on human rights and therefore defining the conditions of their joining the international community. In the end human rights are dynamic and shifting discursive practices that are mobilized by individuals and national authorities alike. Finally, as the measure of Islam's mercy, Iranian human rights might appear to be premised on acts of grace afforded through the state's legal apparatus. How- ever, this legal apparatus, which offers protection through what might be termed atonement, shifts some of the authority from state actors to victims and their fami- lies, possibly situating sovereign power in Iran differently from that in the Western legal perspective, where pardon is an act of grace afforded only by the sovereign.51