Guantanamo update

Reading this story about the possibility of more widespread abuse of Guantanamo Bay detainees got me concerned.

We Americans implicitly trust our governments (federal and local) to make "the right decision" when it comes to our security and justice. We're a dcmocracy, a free country, the best government in the world. And though we recognize we haven't always been this way, we always think at any given moment that we're doing "the right thing."

This creates two problems, I think. First, other countries don't trust our leaders the same way we do (it makes sense -- they didn't elect them), and our aggressive policies intensify hostility in areas we might otherwise have avoided. Detainee abuse is just one example of our being penny-wise and pound-foolish. Other countries, like Cuba, seize on this stuff like what (check out what Cuba did outside the U.S. Interests Section in Havana), much to our international embarrassment.

Second, it feeds the distorted domestic perception of how democracy works. Unlike how our government is portrayed in history books, democracies don't just do things because "it's right." Women didn't get the right to vote because "the government" as a whole just woke up one morning and said, "Hey yeah, women are people, too!" They had to fight for it. It was the same for civil rights -- a democracy responds to its people's demands, not a sense of altruism.

To think, then, that our government will "do the right thing" in the war on terror is naive. Unfortunately, because we are a democracy, our citizens bear greater responsibility for our government's actions than in other countries. When you consider the conditions we have forced the Iraqi citizenry to live in because of the actions, who wasn't elected, well ... I shudder to think what al-Qaeda would consider "justice."

We need to be more careful. If we fail to recognize the double standard we put to the world, we only fuel the fires of discontent in the countries we most need as friends.