powerfully about the Abu Ghraib situation and its aftermath. Marshall is quickly becoming one of my favourite reads on international affairs and Iraq specifically.
There is one matter, however, where he is wrong. He wrote (in the above-referenced post), “But going back almost three years these men made very conscious and specific decisions to disregard or opt out of the various international conventions, rules and traditions governing the treatment of prisoners of war and enemy combatants that are intended to prevent such things from happening.”
This is is simply not accurate. This aspect of US foreign policy – opting out of international rules – goes back well before the current Bush administration. In fact, it began sometime at the end of the Reagan administration and continued unbroken through the GHW Bush and Clinton administrations. The thing that Americans against the war have to really understand is that although Bush and his administrations obvious incompetence are obvious, but the basic policy is largely unchanged. And I see no evidence that it’s going to change under Kerry.
As I have written before, US policy for years has been to work behind the scenes to support the creation of rules that govern the rest of the world – the International Criminal Court, the landmines treaty, Kyoto, and many more – but has never signed on to a single one of them.
