The pacifism of Human Rights Watch

David Bernstein examines a piece at Tikkun Magazine for some insight into the mind of "a leading modern NGO/human rights advocate".

My father had the good fortune to escape Nazi Germany in July of 1938. Among the lessons that I drew from his stories was that military force alone is not enough to combat the world’s evils.

That's a rather odd lesson to draw, I think. Historians seem to agree that if Great Britain and France had challanged Germany militarily any time before the annexation of the Sudetanland, Germany would have been at a decided disadvantage, and would have had to retreat.

I am not a pacifist by any means. I believe in using military force in places like Darfur, where it is necessary to stop the killing.

Note the example Roth gives. It's okay to use military force to stop genocide or other massive human rights violations, but not, e.g., in self-defense.

We also are challenging America’s method of fighting terrorism. There is nothing that is a greater affront to human rights principles than the deliberate killing of civilians. But the Bush administration has chosen to fight terrorism without regard to human rights.

Close your eyes. Think for a moment of what Iraq and Afghanistan would look like right now if the Bush Administration paid no attention to human rights. One can think that the Administration actually has some regard for human rights, or that it thinks that the negative publicity from, say, massacring civilians who support Sadrists, the Taliban, and Sunni terrorists in Iraq would outweight the benefits, but the idea that the U.S. is indiscriminately violating human rights, given the firepower available to the U.S. military, is facially absurd. Such overstatement hardly lends credibility to Roth and HRW.

Overall, I think it's fair to conclude that Roth and HRW, like Amnesty International, are part of the international far left. That's not to say that they don't sometimes do yeoman's work on human rights issues, but that their reports, public statements, et al., must be read critically in light of their underlying ideology, which despite Roth's protestations, is essentially pacifist.