The lies of Obama

Robert Fulford, National Post
Published: Saturday, June 27, 2009

In his attempt to sympathize with the Iranian struggle against a cruel theocracy while maintaining his own reputation, Barack Obama has jumped over standard-issue political bombast and landed in the realm of pure fiction. He's presented his views as an honest and realistic response to Iran's tragedy but instead delivered a fairy-tale version of geopolitics. He may be, after all, a typical President, a careless orator rather than a scrupulous leader. It is not too much to call two vital sentences in his recent press conference lies.

Lie One "The Iranian people have a universal right to assembly and free speech."

No, they don't. There's no such universal right and no one who could conceivably bestow it. Certainly the UN, for all its huffing and puffing, has neither the ability nor the desire to introduce democracy in states ruled by despotism. Iran has known no democracy in living memory -- and at the moment no politician proposes to win it for them. For Iranians, admittedly, things have not always been quite this bad. Arguably, there was less outright oppression under the monarchical Pahlavi dictatorship than under the religious dictatorship Khomeini founded in 1979. But both are deservedly called dictatorships.

In that sense, Iran resembles most other countries, including all the Islamic states in the Middle East. In the minority of countries where rights of assembly and free speech exist, the citizens have struggled for generations to install democracy in laws designed to be unbreakable (though governments sometimes dare break them, and sometimes are rightfully punished by the citizens). These hard-won freedoms, including America's, are demeaned when an American President plucks imaginary rights out of the air and falsely claims they exist.

Lie Two "If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect those rights and heed the will of its own people."

If this means anything, it means there's a standard of democratic fairness that a government must meet if it hopes to acquire the world's respect. But no such international standard exists. We do not demand that countries we deal with treat their people decently. All over the world, states that routinely manage their citizens by violence are treated respectfully by other nations, providing they have power or have something else we want.

The Chinese people are treated abominably by the government in every category, from free speech to religion, but the nations of the world line up to do business with the Chinese government, treating them always with respect. Even when we complain about China's monstrously inadequate civil rights, we do so in tones that imply respect.

Obama's imagined world of "universal" rights would exist if only the expressed principles of the United Nations applied. In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which insists (among other things) that everyone has the right to express opinions without interference, the right to take part in government through freely chosen representatives and the right to freedom of religion (including the freedom to change religion). And yes, if you can read all the way to Article 20 without collapsing in tears, you'll find that, as Obama says, "Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association."

But of course the Declaration of Human Rights has never been anything more than an exercise in wishful thinking, a set of empty gestures based on pious hopes. Why did the authors (who were led by Eleanor Roosevelt) claim that their wishes for human freedom were in fact the "rights" of all humans? They knew, as much as anyone, that only a fortunate minority possessed such rights. There were no such rights, for example, in the vast empire then being assembled by the Soviet Union.

But the defeat of Germany and Japan had only recently been accomplished. Liberal democracy (so it seemed) was in the ascendant. Why not just assume everyone would somehow acquire "fundamental" rights -- and hope for the best? So that great wave of giddy Rooseveltian optimism generated by a gigantic military victory still lives in the rhetoric of Obama's speechwriters.

Alas, the UN is merely an association of 192 states, most of them controlled by leaders who have no interest at all in fulfilling the Declaration. Realization of the "rights" articulated in 1948 remains far in the future. In fact, if we judge by democracy's rate of progress since the 18th century, no one living today will see anything remotely resembling the generalized human rights that Obama so glibly expects.

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca