Bush and the moral obligation to intervene

In case anyone missed it in the preceding post (Paul Wolfowitz: prime example of everything wrong with the Bush administration), here is a quote from Bush from his weekly radio address on March 15, 2003 (four days before the war started):

We know from human rights groups that dissidents in Iraq are tortured, imprisoned and sometimes just disappear; their hands, feet and tongues are cut off; their eyes are gouged out; and female relatives are raped in their presence.

As the Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, said this week, "We have a moral obligation to intervene where evil is in control." Today, that place is Iraq.

Well, not only are there other places today (Sudan, for example) in which--by Bush's own terms--we have a moral obligation to intervene, at least one of those places obligated us--again, by Bush's own standard--to intervene before the Iraq war.

And that would be...North Korea. Check out this 60 Minutes report for details of the evil and cruelty that has been going on in North Korea for years. Here's an excerpt from the report:

Dr. Norbert Vollertsen, a German family physician, spent a year and a half in North Korea as a member of a German group that provides medical aid to the country.

Vollertsen told 60 Minutes he was stunned by what he saw and was able to capture on videotape when he managed to travel around much of this secretive country.

“There are little children in Children Hospital. Eight years old, 6 years old, some of them 15 years old but looking like a 10-year-old because they are suffering from malnutrition,” says Vollertsen.

“But what shocked me mainly was how they are looking," he says. "How sad. There's no more emotional reaction in those eyes. They can't cry anymore. They can't laugh anymore.”

This German doctor also said he was struck by the stripes on their pajamas.

“It was nearly the same picture from Dachau, Auschwitz. We, Germans, were accused that we kept silent during Hitler's Nazi regime, that there was nobody who, who spoke out,” he says. “I saw those children and I gave a promise. That I will not keep silent. Silence is killing in North Korea.”

And Bush bases his policy of "moral obligation" on a quote from Elie Wiesel. How's that for irony? I don't know about you, but children that look like they are in Nazi concentration camps strikes me as evil enough to invoke Bush's "moral obligation." However, since Bush has not intervened in North Korea, apparently the plight of these children is not sufficiently evil for him. Perhaps there is more evil that might suffice.

How about life in general for the rest of the population? Turns out life its own self ain't very pretty in North Korea:

While driving his jeep around the country, Vollertsen said he saw hungry, malnourished people everywhere foraging for food: “And I saw little children at the roadside picking up all those little insects and whatever they can eat. Women who are looking for some leaves and special herbs.”

Sadly, no birds were chirping. “The people are killing whatever can run, whatever can fly,” says Vollersten.

Hazel Smith, who recently spent 13 months in North Korea for the U.N., monitoring food aid shipments, confirms his reports. She said it's not just hospitals, but the whole country that lacks the most basic necessities.

Here’s a sampling from her list: No clean running water. Lack of fuel to boil much water. No soap, no disinfectant, no toilet paper. No toothpaste. No sanitary napkins, but many women have stopped menstruating because of malnutrition.

“There is chronic malnutrition throughout the country now. Which means that children and adults don't grow very much,” says Smith.

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“Even if you're quite privileged, you're going to live in a cold apartment. Having access to water, to sanitation, to electricity is pretty difficult,” says Smith. “The worst thing about life in North Korea now is that people don't know whether they're going to have enough food to survive.”

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“All the shops in Pyongyang empty. No food, no rice, nothing at all but thousands of bottles of sojo, very cheap, produced North Korean liquor,” says Vollersten. “It's real poison. It's toxic, but it will make you drunken immediately and that's the purpose, in order to make people happy.”

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“Some of them are dying because they don't have access to income or food. And North Korea is becoming a nation of petty traders because people have to get by,” adds Smith, who says black markets have sprung up where people barter whatever they can for their next meal.

Surely these conditions are evil enough for our own fearless and oh so moral leader to take action? Well, no, they are not.

What about how North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, runs the government in general? Judge for yourself:

During their 50 years of communist rule, Kim Il Sung, and now his son Kim Jong Il, have sealed off North Koreans from the outside world. Their radios and TVs are specially made to receive only government stations.

The government publishes all newspapers and magazines. No foreign media. No internet. Only loudspeakers everywhere praising Kim Jong Il.

From the early childhood, young children are educated to love Kim Jong Il, says Vollertsen. “To worship him like a god. And that's the main point. It's more like a cult. He's using this brainwashing process, with steady propaganda from early in the morning up to the evening.”

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The constant indoctrination demands rigid conformity. Ideologically, everyone must be in lockstep - especially at those massive outdoor performances that honor their leader. (Former Assistant Secretary of State Harold) Koh says he's appalled that Kim puts his money into a million-member military, and developing nuclear weapons, and ballistic missiles when he can't provide basic necessities for his people.

Food goes first to the military and the elite. For everybody else, Kim force-feeds them propaganda.

“It's a country where there's essentially no freedom, no civil and political rights. People are spying on each other,” says Koh.

A cult leader, forced propaganda and brainwashing, complete government control of information, spending money on weapons instead of feeding the people...That all sounds very evil, and yet Bush has never exercised his "moral obligation." What would he consider to evil enough to require intervention?

How about the equivalent of Nazi concentration camps or Soviet labor camps? North Korea certainly has those.

U.S. officials also told 60 Minutes that North Korea has a dozen such slave-labor camps that together contain perhaps a million people - five percent of the country's population of 22 million.
Any sign of disloyalty can get you sent to slave labor, according to former inmates who say that if one member of a family is arrested, the whole family often has to go, too. Many inmates work 18-hour days in hazardous coalmines.

In some camps, one out of five prisoners die each year from exhaustion or starvation. Others die from being used as guinea pigs for chemical and biological weapons. And guards are encouraged to be brutal and utilize punishment cells.

“The punishment cells that have been described by refugees are very tiny cells which are too small for someone to stand up, but also too short for them to spread their legs out,” says Koh. “So people are in that sort of cramped position. And in those cells they're thrown after they've been beaten or subjected to other kinds of humiliating treatment and they, they're fed or not fed.”

But never fed much. “Human Rights Watch reports that the workers at the labor camp tried to catch rats in their shoes so they can roast them, and have an occasional piece of meat,” adds Koh.

Sen. Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, has heard similar reports from North Korean defectors who escaped into China. He traveled to China's North Korean border, and told 60 Minutes that tens of thousands of defectors are hiding in China to avoid being sent back to a North Korean prison camp.

“You have horrific, horrific stories,” says Brownback, citing public executions, people eating bugs and rats, the routine killing of babies born in prison – even women feeding their family a bit of food laced with rat poison to kill their children before they starve to death. “I’ve had eye-witness testimony.”

Brownback and Vollertsen believe that, just as in Nazi Germany, when the full scope of horror in North Korea is finally revealed, it will be far worse than the initial reports.

And still, Bush has chosen not to intervene in North Korea.

Am I saying that we should intervene in North Korea? No. I am not taking a stand one way or the other. What I am doing is pointing out the hypocrisy of George W. Bush. Was Saddam evil? Yes. Was evil in control in Iraq? Yes. Was that why we invided Iraq? Not likely. Anyone disagreeing should go back and read Paul Wolfowitz: prime example of everything wrong with the Bush administration, which indicates that the administration did not consider ending such evil in Iraq to be worth sacrificing American lives. George Bush talks about a moral obligation to intervene in order to defeat evil, but the suffering of the Iraqi people was not considered sufficient to put Americans in harm's way, and the extreme evil which has long existed in North Korea has all but been ignored by the Bush administration.

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines hypocrisy as "a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion." George Bush's declaration of "moral obligation" fits this definition. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to explain their position--especially since Bush his own self has not.