Geneva What’s That Again?

I’ve said this before, but Belmont Club says it better than I’ve ever seen before:

As currently interpreted the Geneva Conventions only apply to individuals bent on destroying America. Individuals who blow up elementary schools, kidnap children, attack churches and mosques, kill invalids in wheelchairs, plan attacks on skyscrapers in New York, behead journalists, detonate car bombs with children to camouflage their crime, or board jetliners with explosive shoes — all while wearing mufti or even women’s clothing — these are all considered “freedom fighters” of the most principled kind. They and they alone enjoy the protections of the Geneva Convention. As to Americans like Tucker and Menchaca or Israeli Gilad Shalit — or these fifteen British sailors for that matter, it is a case of “what Geneva Convention?”

The Geneva Conventions are treaties. Once upon a time that meant that only citizens of those nations which ratified the Conventions could expected to be protected by them. Today, thanks to a shame I can not fathom, we’ve decided that means that we signed the Conventions to protect everyone in the world, no matter who they are nor what they do.

For decades we’ve turned our backs on violations of the Geneva Conventions by dozens of other nations while flagellating ourselves with a whip named “We must hold ourselves to a higher standard”. To that I say horsepucky. The only standards to which we ever need hold ourselves are the standards we have adopted through our democratic Constitutional processes. We may not always like them and if that’s the case, we ma use those same processes to change them.

What we may not do – not and expect to survive as a people – is to flay our nation’s soul over our faults while steadfastly and arrogantly ignoring the depredations of others. Unfortunately, that is exactly what we have been doing for far too many years. it’s high time we stopped or we simply won’t survive our self-inflicted wounds.

UPDATE: Here’s someone who just doesn’t get it, even a little bit.

I know it shouldn’t, but it still amazes me the knots that the US Right are prepared to tie themselves into knots in their lust for a war with Iran that will redress the perceived mortal insult of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979.

Back in 1979 Iran seized sovereign territory of the United States and a couple hundred citizens and held them for over a year. Does that seem like a “perceived mortal insult” to you?

Or does it sound like an act of war? Shall we consider the annnexing of the Sudetenland, or the invasion of Poland a “perceived mortal insult”? After all, all Germany did was to seized sovereign territory of a couple nations and took their people prisoner. Te Rape of Nanking? No big deal. It wasn’t more than a silly little misunderstanding the Chinese blew way out of proportion.

What Iran did was different only in scale and scale, folks, is entirely unimportant. That we did not treat it then as an act of war is also unimportant. Iran has, since then, killed Americans directly and through paid mercenaries and still holds the territory of ours it seized back in 1979. That’s not a “lust for war”. It is a simple fact.

We may decide, as we did in 1979, to do nothing at all about Iran’s continuing war against us, as this blogger very much wants us to do. Iran’s a long way away and it’s a lot easier to roll over and go back to sleep. Who wants to disturb their comfortable life and their iron-clad world view? After all, we managed to ignore al-Qaeda’s war against us for well over a decade, too. It only cost us a few thousand lives, barely a drop in the bucket compared to the other millions of Americans al-Qaeda hasn’t killed. At some point, though, the Mad Mullahs are going to do something far more deadly than anything they’ve done thus far. Will we keep on thinking it’s a “perceived mortal insult” or will we recognize it as another attack in a war they’ve been fighting for almost thirty years?