Testimony by Douglas J. Feith

Excerpts
from Testimony href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
by

DOUGLAS J.
FEITH

Member of the
Center for Security Policy’s

Board of
Advisors

before

the U.S. House
of Representatives

Human Rights
Caucus

24 April 1991

… Recent events in the Gulf, in
Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union
have highlighted the relationship of
human rights to national security. They
undermine the old notion that a bold,
black line divides humanitarian from
“practical” concerns; they show
that one cannot always
distinguish neatly between the internal
affairs of states and
foreign affairs.

Advancing or safeguarding individual
human rights needs no justification. As a
form of virtue, it is its own reward. But
I wish to focus this morning not on the
morality of taking due account of human
rights in our foreign policies, but on the
important, practical national
security benefits this can yield us. To
appreciate these
benefits is to recognize the unwisdom of
the Administration’s developing relationship
with the regime of Hafez al-Assad of
Syria.

Why should a hard-headed,
security-minded, pragmatic, unsentimental
American care about the way a foreign
government like that of Assad
treats its own people?
The short answer is that it can
have a great deal to do with the way that
foreign government behaves
internationally and it can affect
important U.S. interests,
and not just on the moral plane.

* * *

It is in our interest that
international law — principally, the
actual custom of civilized nations —
should gain potency and become more than
a mere vocabulary. But a
government that exercises unlimited power
at home, being above its own laws,
will hardly feel bound by that
underdeveloped, inferior species of law
known as the norms of
international behavior.

American interests in political
freedom and physical security, peace,
trade, travel and technological progress
are advanced when there is expansion of
the community of states that respect the
human rights of their people and that
recognize law as a constraint on politics
rather than a tool of politics. We
have a very practical
interest in seeing law evolve in
international affairs toward the type of
force that law represents in our
domestic affairs….

Policies of repression at home
and militarism abroad tend to reinforce
each other. Tyrannical
regimes need foreign enemies and they
make them. The armies they build to
capitalize on their neighbors’ weaknesses
are used also to crush domestic
opposition. Where the public has no say
in electing the officials who set the
taxes, states like Syria, Iraq, the
Soviet Union or North Korea can make the
kind of impoverishing expenditures on
arms — entirely disproportionate to GNP
and to defensive needs — that are not
sustainable politically in a democratic
country.

The right-before-our-very-eyes
confirmation of this point is the
enormous boost in Western
security that resulted from the
democratization revolution of Eastern
Europe. With the embrace of
democratic political institutions came an
abandonment of aggressive and repressive
ideology, a disintegration of the
anti-NATO military alliance, a diminution
in military expenditures, a termination
of support for international terrorist
organizations, and an openness to
information, tourism, and business.

Before this democratization, many
Westerners believed that new laws —
peace accords in the form of arms control
treaties — were urgently required to
secure peace between East and West. Now
that the East Europeans have governments
that actually respect law, the urgency
is gone and such treaties are widely
recognized to be superfluous. Peace
is achieved when governments respect law
— that is, respect the rights of other
states — not when lawless governments
cynically sign peace accords.

This is the type of analysis, I
believe, that could help flesh out the
Administration’s concept of a New World
Order. But recent U.S. diplomacy
toward Syria suggests that the
“pragmatists” who make foreign
policy in the Bush Administration do not
see this interconnection among human
rights, limited government, law, peace,
order and Ameri-can interests.
Their impressive action against Iraq’s
theft of Kuwait showed admirable
awareness of the large U.S. interest in
international law enforcement. But the
honor they have recently accorded Assad
shows that the Administration has
not grasped the imprac-ticality and
danger (let alone the immorality) of
pretending that a gangster is a cop.

The factors that made Saddam
Hussein a threat to world order and U.S.
interests — the factors
that compelled us to treat him as an
outlaw rather than a fellow member
of the community of law-abiding
nations apply also in
the case of Hafez al-Assad.

* * *

One of the principal flaws in the
“land for peace” slogan is
precisely the implication that
Israel’s refusal to abandon claims to
“the territories” is as
improper as Syria’s refusal to negotiate
peace with Israel. This perverts
the language and intent of [UN Security
Council resolutions] 242 and 338. Those
resolutions require the parties to the
Arab-Israeli conflict to negotiate peace.
They do not require Israel to
withdraw from all the territories it
acquired in the 1967 war.

Indeed, [these resolutions] implicitly
recognize that the pre-1967 lines must be
redrawn and they make clear that Israel
need not withdraw from any such
territories unless a
“just and lasting peace” is
established in which every state in the
area is acknowledged to
have the “right to live in peace
within secure and recognized boundaries.”
Administration officials are not, in my
opinion, serving the cause of peace by
implying that Israeli policy somehow
justifies Syria (and Jordan) in refusing
to fulfill their obligations to negotiate
a settlement directly with Israel.

The Administration’s
conciliatory policies toward Syria — its
high-level, high visibility
consultations with Assad, acquiescence in
Syrian domination of Lebanon, and
failure to make an issue of
Assad’s despotism, support of terrorism
and anti-Israel rejectionism
— send signals that conflict with the
most important messages that Desert
Storm was supposed to convey. Our
action against Iraq announced to the
world that it is important to take
seriously key principles of international
order: the right of states to live
unthreatened in peace, the paramountcy of
law, the accountability of wrong-doers. Our
embrace of Assad — the man who
stole Lebanon, threatens Israel, and
relies on terrorism as a foreign policy
tool — mocks these principles.

…Assad is altogether as
tyrannical, belligerent and absolute a
dictator as Saddam. If
he has the means to succeed, he can be
counted on to use force or the threat of
force to get his way not only with
Lebanon, but with Israel, Jordan, Iraq
and Turkey. Assad has made all his
neighbors antagonists. It is fair
then to ask why the Administration
wants to relieve Assad from his
relative isolation, enhance his prestige,
and open the way for him
to receive greater subsidies from the
Arab oil states and possibly arms
from the West.

The desire to bring Syria into the
Desert Shield coalition can be understood
as an attempt to maximize the coalition’s
political and military strength. One can
argue that the price paid for this
benefit was excessive and that Syria
would have cooperated against Saddam
anyway for reasons unrelated to
Kuwait, but the rationale for
teaming with Syria in the operation, even
if dubious, was readily comprehensible.

The same cannot be said of the
Administration’s current desire to
“make nice” to Assad.
Law enforcement officials
frequently enlist the help of criminals
against other criminals. But the officials
do not treat their criminal collaborators
as fellow upholders of the law. They
do not work to facilitate the criminal
collaborators’ commission of future
crimes. They do not hold the
criminal collaborators out to the public
as responsible citizens. And
they do not press the mayor to appear on
television shaking the criminal
collaborators’ hands and smiling
warmly.

That would not be good for the law. It
would undermine the local community’s
principles and safety the way the
Bush Administration’s policy toward Syria
is undermining the New
World Order and the safety of the Middle
East.

1. Emphasis
added throughout.