Ideal Illusions:

How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights

James Peck

The ideology and institutions of the human rights movement are unwitting "weapons" of America's ruthless statecraft, argues historian Peck (Washington's China). He condemns Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other groups for a legalistic conception of human rights that champions individual civil and political rights while downplaying economic and social injustices. Their approach, he contends, has abetted Washington's military adventurism, in Vietnam, Central America, and Iraq, by supporting humanitarian intervention as pretexts for invasions; by trying to regulate America's wars of choice while ignoring their illegality and systemic provenance; and by denouncing the violence of insurgents without acknowledging a right of revolutionary violence against class inequality and foreign domination. Peck's Chomskyesque analysis of American foreign policy as an exercise in capitalist imperialism and generic "power" projection can be repetitive, but many of his charges, especially those concerning the whitewashing of abuses committed by the U.S. and its allies, and the tacit endorsement of America's right to attack other countries, do stick. The result is a useful, thought-provoking challenge to the Western human rights consensus. (Mar.)