"PAX AMERICANA?"... PART III FROM DAVOS
Counterpoint to Tutu... A Real World Approach

I love the comments by Mustafa Ceric below:

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, keynote speaker Dick Cheney made an appeal for unity with Europe when he spoke of "our common understanding that today’s threats must be met where they are or those threats will come to us."

He also stated that the key to security is through prosperity, adding: "But while we know that security and prosperity are mutually dependent, we must go a step further and ask how they are best achieved. The answer lies in the values of freedom, justice and democracy…Democracies do not breathe the anger and the radicalism that drag down whole societies to export violence. Terrorists do not find fertile recruiting grounds in societies where young people have the right to guide their own destinies and to choose their own leaders."

These two issues of security and freedom provoked the most questions from audience members.

Question: My name is Mustafa Ceric; I am the Grand Mufti of Bosnia. This is a chance for me to speak on behalf of the Bosnian people and to [express] gratitude for what you have done in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Please, Mr. Vice President, if you can convey to the American people that we will never forget that you came to Bosnia to help us survive as Muslims in the Balkan Peninsula. We didn’t have oil. You didn’t have an interest to gain. You came to Bosnia-Herzegovina just to show your credibility and your sense of morality.

Besides this I would like to say that I like from your speech that this year we have heard more about freedom than about security. I hope that in the future Americans will talk more about freedom around the world than about security. Thank you very much.

Question: Can you explain to us exactly how people can be picked up anywhere around the world, be put in Guantanamo Bay,…not get the right to trial within a reasonable amount of time, and how you relate that to your comment that compromising values in the name of security is not a good idea and how you link that to a democratic society who believes in the right to a free trial, etc.?

Cheney: These are not people picked up at random. We don’t run up and down the streets of London or Paris or Riyadh saying "He’s a likely looking prospect, let’s put him in Guantanamo." These are people primarily who are picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan trying to kill our troops. They were in combat.

They are treated very humanely. They are not under the provisions of the Geneva Convention. They don’t qualify as prisoners of war, but they’re treated appropriately in terms of medical care, in terms of food and the conditions that exist for them. We have in fact released some as we’ve been able to go through the interrogation process and convince ourselves that for one reason or another they no longer constitute a threat or they no longer have intelligence that would be valuable to us in prosecuting the war on terror. We also have a number of people there who I would describe as deadly enemies who are very open and very direct about wanting to kill Americans the first chance they get…Some of them already have been turned over to their country. Some will be prosecuted and tried. Some will be released.

We’ll sort through them. The International Red Cross has visited there. We’ve been very careful in terms of how we proceed and how we do treat them. But we are faced with a situation where the war continues, where people in some cases have come in to the United States whose only intent is to murder civilians, and under those circumstances and given the rules of warfare, we felt we had no choice but to have a repository for these folks as long as they constitute a threat and as long as the conflict continues.

Question: Vice President Cheney…in your Christmas card…you quoted Benjamin Franklin: "If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?" Do you consider the United States to be an empire?

Cheney: First of all, that quote was selected by my wife. She should have to explain why that was on the Christmas card. [laughter] Secondly, it refers to an incident that occurred in our Constitutional Convention when Franklin was speaking about the importance of some recognition of the Almighty in the affairs of man. It should not be taken as some kind of indication that the United States today sees itself as an empire. We don’t. There are some fundamental differences between the United States today—the way we operate, the things we believe in, the way we have conducted ourselves over the course of our history—that distinguish us from what might be identified as an empire.

We do believe very deeply in democratic principles and practices. We have had on occasion in the past the opportunity to deploy massive military forces and to put them into the heart of Europe, into the heart of Asia, and then having done that, to create democracies where previously there had been dictatorships and empires, and then withdraw to our own shores without any aggrandizement in terms of territory or other trappings of empire. I think from the standpoint of history we’re unique in that regard.

So I wouldn’t let the Benjamin Franklin quote be misinterpreted. It’s [not] intended now to talk about the United States as an empire. We don’t see ourselves in that light. We don’t believe we’ve acted that way. I would argue that there are people in the world today who are free of tyranny and have the opportunity to live in freedom and under democracies because of past activities of the United States. Bosnia is one example. If we were a true empire, we would currently preside over a much greater piece of the earth’s surface than we do. That’s not the way we operate.


In Part One, Vice President Cheney spoke about the national deficit and the need for U.N. reform. In Part Two, he gave his assessment of the security threats emanating from Iran and North Korea.