DAVID RIEFF

The terrorist war has a particular difficulty, which is that the temptation to break the rules -- to torture, to execute in a summary way, to assassinate, etc., all the tools of dirty war -- are almost inevitable in a terrorist war, partly because in a terrorist war there is a fundamental erasing of the boundary between war and crime…. once you're fighting people you don't accept are also enemy combatants, once you make them illegitimate the way the administration has declared our enemies in the terrorist war illegitimate, then anything is possible. And I see a kind of moral disaster.

I don’t think that Americans should die to make Iraq free. What are we going to do? Have these endless wars of altruism?

I don't think it's the job of the United States to build democracies from whole cloth. That's Wilsonianism to me of the most crazy kind.

The logic of the human rights movement is imperialist. I don't think it was necessarily intended this way. But once you talk about categories like international justice, or you talk about bringing people to justice, or an end to impunity -- I'm just using the standard slogans of the human rights movement -- if you're really serious about that, the only way to do it is by at least the possible use of force. The human rights movement, whether wittingly or unwittingly, has increasingly become a force for a recolonization of the world, in the name of rights…. the human rights movement, if it had its way, would plunge us into epics of war.

These days, only the most extreme, most apocalyptic situations are likely to move donors in the rich world.

The terrorist war has a particular difficulty, which is that the temptation to break the rules -- to torture, to execute in a summary way, to assassinate, etc., all the tools of dirty war -- are almost inevitable in a terrorist war, partly because in a terrorist war there is a fundamental erasing of the boundary between war and crime…. once you're fighting people you don't accept are also enemy combatants, once you make them illegitimate the way the administration has declared our enemies in the terrorist war illegitimate, then anything is possible. And I see a kind of moral disaster.

I don't think it's the job of the United States to build democracies from whole cloth. That's Wilsonianism to me of the most crazy kind.

The logic of the human rights movement is imperialist. I don't think it was necessarily intended this way. But once you talk about categories like international justice, or you talk about bringing people to justice, or an end to impunity -- I'm just using the standard slogans of the human rights movement -- if you're really serious about that, the only way to do it is by at least the possible use of force. The human rights movement, whether wittingly or unwittingly, has increasingly become a force for a recolonization of the world, in the name of rights…. the human rights movement, if it had its way, would plunge us into epics of war.

I don’t think that Americans should die to make Iraq free. What are we going to do? Have these endless wars of altruism?

These days, only the most extreme, most apocalyptic situations are likely to move donors in the rich world.