[extropy-chat] Krugman on the state of play

[Damien Broderick]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/01/opinion/01krugman.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=

"As a result of the American military," President Bush declared last week, 
"the Taliban is no longer in existence."

It's unclear whether Mr. Bush misspoke, or whether he really is that 
clueless. But his claim was in keeping with his re-election strategy, 
demonstrated once again in last night's debate: a president who has done 
immense damage to America's position in the world hopes to brazen it out by 
claiming that failure is success.
[...]

We can already see one example of this when we look at the question of 
torture. Abu Ghraib has largely vanished from U.S. political discussion, 
largely because the administration and its Congressional allies have been 
so effective at covering up high-level involvement. But both the 
revelations and the cover-up did terrible damage to America's moral 
authority. To much of the world, America looks like a place where top 
officials condone and possibly order the torture of innocent people, and 
suffer no consequences.

What we need is an effort to regain our good name. What we're getting 
instead is a provision, inserted by Congressional Republicans in the 
intelligence reform bill, to legalize "extraordinary rendition" - a 
euphemism for sending terrorism suspects to countries that use torture for 
interrogation. This would institutionalize a Kafkaesque system under which 
suspects can be sent, at the government's whim, to Egypt or Syria or Jordan 
- and to fight such a move, it's up to the suspect to prove that he'll be 
tortured on arrival. Just what we need to convince other countries of our 
commitment to the rule of law.

Most Americans aren't aware of all this. The sheer scale of Mr. Bush's 
foreign policy failures insulates him from its political consequences: 
voters aren't ready to believe how badly the war in Iraq is going, let 
alone how badly America's moral position in the world has deteriorated.

But the rest of the world has already lost faith in us. In fact, let me 
make a prediction: if Mr. Bush gets a second term, we will soon have no 
democracies left among our allies - no, not even Tony Blair's Britain. Mr. 
Bush will be left with the support of regimes that don't worry about the 
legalities - regimes like Vladimir Putin's Russia.

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No, wait, if John Howard's govt returns to power in Australia in a week's 
time, Oz will still be panting along behind, eyes tight shut.

Damien Broderick