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False Choices, or Media Traps
by Immanuel Wallerstein The United States is going through two sets of debates among presidential candidates, one set each for Democrats and Republicans.
These debates usually have journalists as conveners and questioners, and the journalists seek to force the candidates to commit themselves on supposedly difficult choices.
These "difficult" choices are regularly formulated in ways that they are media traps, sometime maliciously so.
[Republished at PFP with Agence Global permission.]
In the candidate debates, the questions are rarely of use to
voters or candidates, and are often absurd. Exhibit A, last month to
the Democratic candidates: "Are human rights more important than
American national security?" Nonsensical.
A typical example occurred on Nov. 14 at a Democratic debate
presided over by Wolf Blitzer. He posed the question, "Are human rights
more important than American national security?"
Obviously, the answer
Blitzer was forcing was the pseudo-patriotic one that national security
took precedence over everything else. Bravely, Richardson voted for
human rights. But Dodd, Biden, and Clinton all said it was obvious that
national security was the primary consideration. And Obama said the two
considerations are complementary. Kucinich was cut off from answering.
No
one said the question was an absurd one, in two different ways. First
of all, was it a question about foreign policy? Or was it a question
about U.S. internal policy? Blitzer and the candidates assumed it was a
question about foreign policy, at the moment a question about U.S.
policy in Pakistan. One person tried to shift the ground to internal
policy, but he was not allowed to do this.
Yet, the question
is of course primarily one about U.S. internal policy. George W. Bush
has been persistently engaged in diminishing human rights in the United
States on the grounds that something called "national security"
requires this, and on the grounds that national security always comes
first. Most Republican politicians and presidential candidates endorse
this position enthusiastically, and most Democratic politicians and
presidential candidates are intimidated into agreeing, lest they seem
weak or unpatriotic.
But there is an obvious question to which
almost no one alludes. What is it that the nation is trying to
"secure"? The standard answer, on the rare occasions that this question
is explicitly posed, is that the nation is trying to secure "liberty"
or "freedom" or "human rights," which the United States is said to
enjoy and which is the source of its national pride.
The
illogic of seeking to "secure" freedom or human rights by diminishing
freedom or human rights seems to escape attention, as it did when Wolf
Blitzer posed his unhelpful, not to say malicious, question.
The Obama
answer, that the two are complementary, is meaningless. The logically
necessary answer is that it is freedom or human rights that the
government, the media, and the people should always be trying to
"secure." There is nothing else to secure. It is surely not "life" that
one is trying to secure. If it were, why would we make of Patrick Henry
an American cultural hero because he said "Give me liberty or give me
death"?
If one poses this pseudo-question as a question of
foreign policy, it is equally a trap. Is the United States government,
or any government, in fact able to "secure" human rights in Pakistan,
or any other country? And if it does undertake actions with these
ostensible objectives, does it, as a result, "secure" these human
rights in these other countries?
The clear answer of five hundred
years of history of the modern world-system is that such interventions
occasionally have positive results but most frequently make the
situation worse, from any middle-run standard. The Iraq invasion surely
provides confirmation of this elementary observation. The primary
historical observation we can make about the geopolitics of the modern
world-system is that major powers have almost never engaged in
interventionist action for any other reason than preserving their power
position and advantages over the middle run.
The rhetoric they employ
-- either of human rights or of national security -- is vacuous for the
most part, and is used primarily to throw dust in our eyes.
Unfortunately, throwing dust to blind us to reality is most often a
successful tactic in the short run.
Immanuel
Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author
of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New
Press).
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Released: 01 December 2007
Word Count: 657
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Global is the exclusive syndication agency for The Nation, Le Monde
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Hertsgaard, Rami G. Khouri, Peter Kwong,Tom Porteous, Patrick Seale and
Immanuel Wallerstein.
-------------------
Released: 01 December 2007
Word Count: 657
Rights & Permissions Contact: Agence Global, 1.336.686.9002, rights@agenceglobal.com
-------------------
Writings 
The United States is going through two sets of debates among presidential candidates, one set each for Democrats and Republicans. 
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