Dear world, please confront America

BY NAOMI WOLF

IS IT possible to fall out of love with your own country? For two years, I, like many Americans, have been focused intently on documenting, exposing, and alerting the nation to the Bush administration's criminality and its assault on the Constitution and the rule of law — a story often marginalised at home. I was certain that when Americans knew what was being done in their name, they would react with horror and outrage.
Three months ago, the Bush administration still clung to its devil's sound bite, "We don't torture." Now, Doctors Without Borders has issued its report documenting American-held detainees' traumas. The Red Cross report has leaked: torture and war crimes. Jane Mayer's impeccably researched exposé, The Dark Side, just hit the stores: torture, crafted and directed from the top. The Washington Post gave readers actual video footage of the abusive interrogation of a Canadian minor, Omar Khadr, who was seen showing his still-bleeding abdominal wounds, weeping and pleading with his captors. So the truth is out and freely available. And America is still napping, worrying about its weight, and hanging out at the mall.
I would have thought so much exposure would fuel a popular groundswell of revulsion, similar to the nineteenth-century anti-slavery movement. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if torture is not wrong, nothing is wrong. And yet no such thing occurred. It was then that I realised that I could not love my country right now. If this is what Americans are feeling, if that is who we are, we don't deserve our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Indeed, even America's vaunted judicial system has failed to constrain obvious abuses. A Federal court has ruled that the military tribunals system — Star Chambers where evidence derived from torture is used against the accused — can proceed. Another recently ruled that the president may call anyone anywhere an "enemy combatant" and detain him or her indefinitely.
So Americans are colluding with a criminal regime. We have become an outlaw nation — a clear and present danger to international law and global stability — among civilised countries that have been our allies. We are — rightly — on Canada's list of rogue nations that torture.
Many Americans hope that an Obama victory in November will roll back this nightmare. But this is no time to yield to delusions. Even if Obama wins, he will be a radically weakened president. The Bush administration has created a transnational apparatus of lawlessness that he alone, without global intervention, can neither roll back nor control.
Private security firms — for example, Blackwater — will still be operating, neither accountable to him or to Congress nor, they have argued, bound by international treaties. Weapons manufacturers and the telecommunications industry, with billions at stake in maintaining a hyped "war on terror" and a global surveillance market, will deploy a lavishly financed army of lobbyists to defend their interests.
Moreover, if elected, Obama will be constrained by his own party. In fact, the Democrats in Congress will be even more ideologically divided after November if, as many expect, conservative party members defeat Republican incumbents damaged by their association with Bush.
Where grassroots US pressure has not worked, money still talks. We need targeted government-led sanctions against the US by civilised countries, including international divestment of capital. Many studies have shown that tying investment to democracy and human rights reform is effective in the developing world. There is no reason why it can't be effective against the world's superpower.
We also need an internationally coordinated strategy for prosecuting the war criminals at the top and further down the chain of command — individual countries pressing charges against US criminals, as Italy and France have done.
Although the United States is not a signatory to the statute that established the International Criminal Court, violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions are war crimes for which anyone — potentially even the US president — may be tried in any of the other 193 countries that are parties to the conventions.
We Americans are either too incapable or too dysfunctional to help ourselves. We need our friends to intervene, just like drug addicts or the mentally ill who refuse treatment. We need them to remember us as we were in our better moments, and to take action to save us from ourselves.
Naomi Wolf, the author, most recently, of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot and the forthcoming Give me Liberty: How to Become an American Revolutionary, is co-founder of the American Freedom Campaign, a US democracy movement. Distributed by Project Syndicate