The wrong target

Waiting for me in my inbox when I got home from class was a copy of Nick Kristof's column in The New York Times. In the article, Kristof describes a woman who he met in rural Pakistan. Mukhtaran Bibi was sentenced to be gang-raped by the local tribal council in order to cover up a different crime committed by her social superiors. After her ordeal, she shocked the community by testifying against the men who raped her. Now, they're on death row, and she's living under police protection, afraid of what's going to happen when the police officers eventually leave.

When I read it, a sense of moral disgust began to boil within me. Any society, modern, tribal, fundamentalist or otherwise, that condones the use of group-rape as a punishment is simply antithetical to everything that I believe about politics and justice.

I am guessing that the same holds true for everyone else. This is not just against my beliefs, but those of civilized people everywhere. In short, what Kristof wrote about was savage and barbaric, cruel and unusual.

I find it ironic that one of the major criticisms lodged against the President Bush is that he's a moral absolutist. Some things are good, some are evil. Some behavior is simply downright wrong.

This election, we're offered a choice between two candidates. It is in many ways a question of absolutism versus relativism in foreign policy. Bush has an articulated vision for a democratic Middle East, of universal human rights and dignity and of good states and bad states. Saudi Arabia, long the whipping boy of human rights activists, is now on a State Department watch list. Iran should not be allowed to go nuclear. Why? Because it cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons.

Sen. Kerry is, in many ways, the candidate of foreign policy relativism. The Times tells us how much he values outside opinions. He talks endlessly about consultation, allies, coalitions and the United Nations. He is, in many respects, the candidate of the status quo Middle East — or at least the pre-9/11 status quo, where we pretend to lecture about human rights and just take their oil, and powers in the region pretend to listen while getting rich and allowing morally despicable actions to continue.

You don't have to like all aspects of the president's vision. I certainly don't. However, I don't understand how anyone who abhors the behavior that Kristof described in Pakistan can support the status-quo in the Middle East. How can someone who believes in universal human rights think that the U.S. military is a force of oppression, and by extension, that Afghan women were better off under the Taliban and that Iraq is worse off with Saddam Hussein out of the picture?

How can someone who protested apartheid, rants about divestment in Israel, and boycotts clothing made in sweatshops stand by the sidelines as the burka is removed as the official daily garb of half of Afghanistan? Do universal rights and freedoms not apply to countries that have other political systems? To countries with other religions? To countries temporarily occupied by American troops under Republican administrations?

Why are those who (legitimately and correctly) protested the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib mysteriously silent when Saddam's torture chambers were closed forever? Why were they silent when Iraqi Olympians could, for the first time, lose a soccer game without fearing Uday's sadistic treasure chest? Why were they silent when women finally gained the ability to go to school in Afghanistan?

I'm not saying that the Bush administration has been the best friend of liberal America over the past three years — far from it. I do, however, have this sneaking suspicion that had President Clinton undertaken the same actions, those who hate Bush most would be jumping for joy — the same way they did after U.S. involvement in Bosnia. Suspicions aside, all I want is for United for Peace and Justice to stop flying posters of the president with a Hitler mustache and realize that the devil is found in oppressive tyranny and theocracy, not at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The lives of people like Mukhtaran Bibi depend on it.