Sarah always seems to locate interesting tidbits around the net. This morning she found a feel-good story about the US in MSM–well, Washington Times, no shill for the left.
Lorne Craner, president of the International Republican Institute, served as the State Department’s human rights chief for most of President Bush’s first term.
“I was obviously concerned that issues like Abu Ghraib could hurt our standing and our ability to support our values abroad,” says Mr. Craner, whose tenure was marked by international criticism of U.S. actions on everything from the Kyoto global-warming pact to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.
“But I found that the American experience and American ideals still were very powerful almost everywhere I went,” Mr. Craner says. “People realized we are not perfect, but it did not undermine our credibility.”
The article continues to compare our strengths, both hard and soft power. But I think that quote above hits on something that is misperceived by many: “People realized we are not perfect, but it did not undermine our credibility.” The issue in mind mind is Why?
Because we are far more open than any other society on Earth? Perhaps the fact that we have a First Amendment, one that prevents the government from restricting our ability to criticize it, keeps us honest. Today, Thomas Paine would have a blog. We can see, daily, that we as a nation are not perfect, but we do what we can to try and achieve perfection. Yet we know that isn’t possible–well, most of us. There are still some on the far left who dream of Utopia. It reminds me of my flight line job. Every day I went to work with the desire to have every flight launch on time and every aircraft to be fully mission capable. Perfection. Yet I knew that would happen on only the rarest of occasions. But that was the goal.
Our credibility lies in the fact that we don’t pretend to be perfect. Think for a minute about those who cause the most problems in today’s world. Islamicists come first to mind. They view their culture as the one perfect way. We understand our weaknesses, far better than we sometimes realize. We’ve grown accustomed to them even as we strive to overcome them. When we look at something like Abu Ghraib, we are appalled. Nobody else in the world is, although many feigned disgust.
We are accused of imposing our own values on Iraq. Okay, what values do you mean? We have many, only one of which is a representative government. We certainly want the government in Iraq to be friendly, or at least not antagonistic. That is in our interest. Beyond that, however, we have only the expectation that Iraq will have a representative government in some form. And that is for the benefit of the Iraqi people who will, for the first time, govern themselves.
It reminds me of Churchill’s comment: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.”