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Schulz's Tainted Legacy takes on both activists and administration |
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By The Hill Staff
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Posted: 11/04/03 12:00 AM [ET] |
William Schulz’s new book, Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights, will provoke almost everyone who reads it — and that certainly is one of its many strengths.
Human rights activists will be dismayed as they are taken to task for failing to recognize the true evils of terrorism. Supporters of President Bush and his efforts to combat terror will find Schulz’s stringent criticism of the administration’s human rights policy challenging.
It is clear that Schulz’s passion for his topic, his wide-ranging experience and his well-respected standing within the human rights community give him a unique and valuable perspective on human rights policy in the United States after Sept. 11.
What is particularly gratifying is the nuance with which Schulz approaches many of the difficult questions facing America. Too often, our response to terrorism is caricatured by those who find that response wanting. Not so with Schulz. Even where his viewpoint differs from that of the Bush administration (and it is fair to say that it differs substantially in many regards), Schulz’s analysis is respectful of and responsive to the countervailing factors that have led to the policies America now pursues.
To this, add its spare and direct prose style and Tainted Legacy will make a worthwhile addition to the bookshelf of anyone who is concerned about human rights and America’s response to terror in the post-Sept. 11 world — whatever their ultimate perspective on Schulz’s analysis and policy prescriptions. Schulz challenges you to think and respond.
It must, nonetheless, be said that in the end Schulz fails to persuade. The fundamental premise of Tainted Legacy is that an enhanced appreciation for human rights and respect for international opinion will improve America’s ability to combat terror by removing or ameliorating one of the principal causes of complaint that lie at the root of the terrorist impulse.
If I understand Schulz correctly, he is of the view that America’s spotty human rights record is at least one component of the casus belli of terror and an even greater component in generating sympathy for the terrorists’ anti-American impulse among the general population of the world. The diagnosis is simple and plausible, yet in the end, I fear, it is wrong.
The terrorist impulse is not about a sense of rights and grievance. Nor, as Jessica Stern of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill recently noted, is it about poverty, lack of education or the failures of democracy. Rather, Stern says, it is about “a feeling of humiliation” and “absolute rage.” As she notes, believing that we can change the causes of terror through alleviating poverty or fostering the growth of a liberal democracy is a “profound error.”
So too, I fear, is Schulz’s belief that the war against terrorists can be won by adoption of a broad international vision of human rights.
In the end, the divergence between Schulz’s vision and the one that animates the Bush administration is as old as ancient Greece. At the core, Schulz’s vision is Platonist, with a firm and enduring belief in the perfectibility of mankind. If, Schulz hypothesizes, we can simply lead by example, then surely others will eventually come to see that we are well-meaning and, as a consequence, coexist with us. Though the pursuit of human rights for its own sake is, indeed, a virtue that America should embrace wherever possible, reality is not that rosy. Rather, the world is Aristotelian and Hobbesian — a greater respect for human rights will not so readily translate into a safer, terrorist-free world.
In short, Schulz is too great an optimist. But his powerful optimistic vision is a welcome addition to the debate.
Rosenzweig is senior legal research fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation and adjunct professor of law at George Mason University.
Book reviewed:
TAINTED LEGACY
9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights
By William Schulz
208 pages; $12.95
Thunder’s Mouth Press
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