Mr. Obama, How About Sanctions – No Fly Zone – Observer League for Uzbekistan?

Thursday, 12. January 2012

Let’s Make This Principled & Consistent; Let’s Go to War with All!

Our nation is famous for many things. Things that it is known for. Things that in one way or another represent it. Things that become synonymous with America or being Americans. Our foreign policy and our presidents are no exception. If you were to ask the recipients of our foreign policy there would be one adjective they’d all agree upon. Unanimously. There is one common and unanimously agreed upon ‘thing’ when it comes to US foreign policy and practices: It is called Hypocrisy. Granted there are slight variations here and there, but the never changing and ever present hypocrisy always remains.
Read the newspapers and watch the coverage of international news broadcast on our networks and cables. There it is. Glaring hypocrisy. Every single day. Hundreds of times a day. Listen to presidential and state department briefings and statements. There it is. Filled with it. Shameless hypocrisy. Check out our congressional records. Day in and Day out. Ever present. Consistent hypocrisy.
I could set up a whole new website to track US foreign policy hypocrisy examples, and it would be filled with them, tens of pages a day, and hundreds of instances. You don’t even need to have a well-developed hypocrisy-detector. It is so bold and obvious even way below-average processing minds can detect it! I am very serious.
This morning I found at least 32 bold examples of our hypocrisy-ridden foreign policy, practices and rhetoric. And I was not even looking for them. They were everywhere: mainstream, pseudo-alternative streams, semi-alternative streams … You name it! I wanted to pick one and showcase it. I could have picked any of them: Bahrain, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Israel, Turkey … Basically any of our ‘intimate allies’ in ‘this and that’ part of the world. You name it. However, I exercised a bit of self-restrain and settled for one. And, here it is [All Emphasis Mine]:
Obama Gives Uzbekistan free Pass to Terrorize Press
Why is the Obama administration sanctioning one post-Soviet dictator with an atrocious human rights record and not another?
Barack Obama has signed a new bill banning some top Belarusian officials from visiting the United States — and requiring Washington to monitor restrictions on press freedom and human rights abuses in Belarus — because President Alexandr Lukashenko wantonly jails political opponents and journalists.
Sound familiar?
Those are hallmarks of Uzbekistan strongman Islam Karimov’s regime, where journalists are regularly imprisoned and critics tortured. Says the Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ): “He personally oversaw the May 2005 massacre in the city of Andijan, and his regime virtually annihilated the independent press after it spread the word about those brutalities.” But instead of censure, Karimov “has received stunningly cordial treatment from the Obama administration,” including, in the past few months, a friendly phone call from the president and a visit from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
…
Here is what CPJ had to Say:
There are scores of examples to position the Uzbek leader as far more brutal and dictatorial than Lukashenko’s regime. The human rights abuses include forced child labor; arbitrary detentions and torture of detainees; harassment of lawyers and imprisonment of rights defenders; absolute state control over the media and Internet; and eviction of the last international monitor–Human Rights Watch–from its offices in Tashkent. All of these and other issues are listed in the U.S. State Department’s own 2010 Human Rights report for Uzbekistan, which brands the country as “an authoritarian state.”
Yet, in September, Karimov received a warm phone call from Obama, and heard appraisal on his “progress” in human rights from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her October visit to Tashkent. Also last year, the U.S. Congress removed what was left of the 2004 arms embargo imposed against Uzbekistan in connection with its grave human rights record.
And here is a bit of explanation (Not talking ‘justification’!) from Eurasia Net:
So why the double standard? The answer, as EurasiaNet readers know, is that Uzbekistan is essential to prosecuting the war in Afghanistan. Because Pakistan does not offer a reliable supply route to Afghanistan, Washington has turned to post-Soviet Central Asia for a transit corridor. Most supplies for the NATO war effort now arrive via the Northern Distribution Network, a web of rail and truck traffic that ultimately bottlenecks in Uzbekistan before crossing over into northern Afghanistan.
…
This isn’t the first time a respected watchdog has slammed the hypocrisy in Obama’s realpolitik. With Uzbekistan increasingly essential to the war, it won’t be the last.
…
Yah, call it realpolitik, call it forced by necessity, call it whatever – everyone, anyone with a semi-working brain, would tell you what this is: hypocrisy. You see, the atrocious practices cited for Uzbekistan could be grounds (read ‘excuses’) for sanctions, no fly zone, embargo, and ultimately outright war if it were Syria, Iran, and soon to join the list-Venezuela. In this case, it is our dictator, it is our regime, and it is our water-carrying nation for our nasty-dirty-shady operations and wars. Thus, our president-government goes into its ‘praise-financial aid-military support-trade’ mode. Consistency is the enemy of hypocrisy. Otherwise, Mr. Obama would be talking Central Asia League Observers, Sanctions, and War Threats for Uzbekistan.

# # # #

Sibel Edmonds' Boiling Frogs Post | Home of the Irate Minority