Under the Obama administration, nations that appeared on such lists as human rights abusers and state sponsors of terror has tended to be based on an idea that now seems odd and outdated—evidence. For Team Trump, these lists are all about the narrative they’re trying to create (with a side order of who has a lot of oil/where would it be neat to have a hotel). But in deliberately altering the list of nations who promote child soldiers, Rex Tillerson appears to have simply violated US law.
A confidential State Department “dissent” memo not previously reported said Tillerson breached the Child Soldiers Prevention Act when he decided in June to exclude Iraq, Myanmar, and Afghanistan from a U.S. list of offenders in the use of child soldiers. This was despite the department publicly acknowledging that children were being conscripted in those countries.
Why did Tillerson do this? Because it makes it easier to slip these countries military aid. Plus, admitting that Iraq and Afghanistan are putting children under arms makes it harder to draw the strict good guys/bad guys line that Tillerson, and Trump, want in the Middle East.
And telling the story they want to tell is more important than the fact that these nations are turning children into cannon fodder.
Documents reviewed by Reuters also show Tillerson’s decision was at odds with a unanimous recommendation by the heads of the State Department’s regional bureaus overseeing embassies in the Middle East and Asia, the U.S. envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the department’s human rights office and its own in-house lawyers.
It’s another illustration of how “America First” means “people in the rest of the world are disposable.” Even children.
It’s not as if this problem suddenly popped up. In 2016, the Obama administration acknowledged the problems, but provided Iraq and Afghanistan with exceptions—which the law allows. What’s different this time is that Tillerson simply overrode the information provided to him and gave these countries a pass without even acknowledging that they had an issue.
Rather than saying “You’ve got a problem, but we’re going to work with you anyway.” Tillerson simply said “What problem?”
The dissenting U.S. officials stressed that Tillerson’s decision to exclude Iraq, Afghanistan and Myanmar went a step further than the Obama administration’s waiver policy by contravening the law and effectively easing pressure on the countries to eradicate the use of child soldiers.
The former approach was a recipe for doing little to genuinely address the problem. The new approach is simply doing nothing.
Plus, it’s against the law.