Political hypocrisy

The U.S. has been accused of scant ratification of human rights treaties despite its official policy of promoting human rights worldwide.[20] In one case, the U.S. has been criticized for refusing to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the American opposition to this convention is said to be primarily shaped by political and religious conservatives.,[21] The U.S. has publicly stated that it is opposed to torture, but has been criticized for condoning it in the School of the Americas. The U.S. has advocated a respect for national sovereignty but has supported internal guerrilla movements and paramilitary organizations, such as the Contras in Nicaragua.[22][23] The U.S. has also been accused of denouncing alleged rights violations in China while overlooking alleged human rights abuses by Israel.[24] The Defense Technical Information Center reports that the U.S. did not pursue its human rights policy in South Korea, the Philippines, and Iran's Pahlavi dynasty, for strategic reasons, exposing the hypocrisy of "human rights diplomacy."[25] According to the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, trust is the fundamental problem of the U.S. in the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world. Arabs and the rest of the Muslim world, according to this report, have simply spent too much time listening to U.S. rhetoric and then watching the U.S. continually fail to deliver on it.[26] A number of authors have attacked the U.S. attitude towards human rights: Ahmed an-Naim sees the U.S. monitoring of the international human rights as a pretext for its coercive humanitarian intervention in pursuit of its own foreign policy goals.[27] Francis Boyle writes that genocide is perceived legal today when carried out at the request of the U.S. and its allies, such as Israel.[28] According to Boyle, the U.S. government promoted the man responsible for blowing up an Iranian civilian airliner but wrongly sanctioned Libya when a U.S. airliner was attacked.[29] When former US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, took office, his department outlined general guidelines to be followed “We should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea and Iran,” read the leaked memo, sent to Tillerson to guide his policy actions, suggesting that human rights is a tool that can only be used against enemies, not friends.[30]

The U.S. foreign policy language extols its worldwide support for the cause of democracy, though Eugenio Lilli suggests that this rhetoric does not match the conduct of U.S., particularly in the Greater Middle East.[15] In an article called Astounding Hypocrisy, Arab News writes that Palestinians voted for Hamas in defiance of Israel but the administration of George W. Bush made it clear that the U.S. would not accept the outcome of the free election. In the same speech, however, Bush expressed his hopes for a democratic Iran and a pro-American government there.[31] During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Muslim communities largely believed that promoting democracy was used as a pretext by the Bush administration to justify the invasion.[15] Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the search for restricted weapons, the United States claimed, was the first priority for the country; though Bush later openly proclaimed regime change as the objective. The invasion was codenamed "the battle for Iraqi freedom," and American propagandists, according to Mack H Jones, flooded their messaging with homilies about the U.S. desire and intention to liberate the Iraqi people and offer them western-style democracy. The Bush administration's ostensible desire to provide democracy and freedom to the Iraqi people, while continuing to align itself with several repressive nondemocratic regimes around the world including some Middle Eastern client states, is yet another example of American duplicity, according to Jones.[32]

Al Raya writes that the U.S. attack on Iran over its nuclear program is not met with any Western opposition to Israel and its alleged arsenal of more than 200 nuclear warheads.[33] Sokolski and Gilinsky see this as inconsistent with the U.S. nonproliferation policy, adding that every U.S. president since Bill Clinton has pledged, though not publicly, not to press the Jewish state to give up its nuclear weapons as long as it continued to face existential threats in the region. While everyone on the world who has even a slight interest in the subject is aware of the truth, the U.S. government has enacted a regulation—described in the U.S. Energy Department's Classification Bulletin WPN-136 on Foreign Nuclear Capabilities—that threatens government employees with severe punishment if they acknowledge Israel has nuclear weapons.[34] It has also been suggested that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 had little to do with the destruction of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, as officially claimed, but was instead meant to realize the PNAC goal of establishing a permanent U.S. military presence in the region and installing a puppet state in Iraq.[32]

Daryl Glaser suggests that the U.S. war on terrorism has been undermined by its support of the Israeli government, pro-western Arab dictatorships, and authoritarian Islamist groups while invading designated "rogue" states such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Glaser explains the American policies have robbed Arab and Muslim countries of the moral authority they require to effectively combat terrorism. These administrations are unable to explain to their citizens why legitimate grievances (particularly against Israel) should be stifled while the West promotes state and opposition terrorism of its own. Furthermore, Glaser continues, because American policies inflame Arab and Muslim rage, new terrorist groups may emerge from their ranks.[35]

Francis Boyle suggests that the first step towards addressing the terrorism problems created by international terrorist actions directed against American interests around the world, is to implement the Palestinian people's internationally-recognized legal right to self-determination and a state of their own.[36] When Abu Nidal organization took sole responsibility for the Rome and Vienna bombings, President Reagan asserted that "these murderers could not carry out their crimes without the sanctuary and support provided by regimes such as Colonel Qaddafi’s in Libya." Reagan then suspended all commercial transactions between the U.S. and Libya and recalled all Americans living or working in Libya. Boyle, however, notes that U.S. oil companies in Libya were exempted from these Reagan's orders.[36]