Glenn Greenwald has a few choice words about an exchange between British Prime Minister David Cameron and Respect Party MP George Galloway. It started like this:
Galloway stood to ask Cameron about a seeming contradiction in the policy of the British government (one shared by the US government). He wanted to know why it is that the British government is so intent on fighting and bombing Islamic extremists in Mali, while simultaneously arming and funding equally brutal Islamic extremists in Syria…
Cameron’s response:
“Some things come and go,” proclaimed the Prime Minister, “but there is one thing that is certain: wherever there is a brutal Arab dictator in the world, he will have the support of [Galloway].”
Greenwald makes this observation:
As usual, anyone who questions the militarism of western governments is instantly smeared as a sympathizer or even supporter of tyrants. Thus, those who opposed the aggressive attack on Iraq were pro-Saddam; those who now oppose bombing Iran love the mullahs; those who oppose Nato intervention in Syria or Libya harbor affection for Assad and Ghadaffi – just as those who opposed the Vietnam War fifty years ago or Reagan’s brutal covert wars in Latin America thirty years ago were Communist sympathizers, etc. etc. Cameron’s outburst was just the standard smear tactic used for decades by western leaders to try to discredit anyone who opposes their wars.
The more important point here is that of all the people on the planet, there is nobody with less authority to accuse others of supporting “brutal Arab dictators in the world” than David Cameron and his Nato allies, including those in the Obama administration.
This is how I feel whenever I see Congress chewing out some group of corporate executives (oil companies, banks, auto manufacturers, etc) about their incompetence or greed, when Congress itself is the poster-child for corruption, callous self-interest, and financial ineptitude.
The icing on the cake for Americans comes at the end of the article, when he speaks of the same hypocrisy by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:
The outgoing US Secretary of State on Wednesday unleashed this bizarre description of the Egyptian people: “It’s hard going from decades under one-party or one-man rule, as somebody said, waking up from a political coma and understanding democracy.”
[…]
Indeed, it was Hillary Clinton – not the Egyptian people – who proclaimed in 2009: “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.”
I’m pretty certain that, in order to be successful as a politician, you have to be completely devoid of conscience. And, in order to be a member of a political party, you have to be completely devoid of any capacity to detect that defect in your party’s candidates.