Senate should reject Tillerson
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a war crime as “a crime (as genocide or maltreatment of prisoners) committed during or in connection with war – usually used in plural.”
Rex Tillerson, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of state, needs to better familiarize himself with that definition.
During his confirmation hearings last week, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio asked Tillerson whether Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. Tillerson, a former CEO of Exxon Mobil and recipient of the Russian Order of Friendship in 2013, declined to attribute that title to his close friend. So for Tillerson, Putin’s brutal history of invading and occupying Crimea, of continued threats to Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, and, most recently, Russian involvement in genocide in Syria, apparently do not constitute war crimes. You know the old expression: If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck.
Rubio raised serious concerns. He believes that, after the president of the United States, the American secretary of state is the second-most-powerful and influential government official on the world stage. In the presidential line of succession, if confirmed, Rex Tillerson would be fourth in that line, after the vice president, speaker of the House, and president of the Senate. More importantly, after Trump, Tillerson would be the voice of the U.S. government to countries around the world. He would be the administration’s point man when expressing America’s opposition to all sorts of human rights abuses beyond our shores.
Tillerson’s ties to the Kremlin, and especially to Putin, are long, deep, and worthy of further scrutiny and investigation. Senators, like Rubio, have every right to be skeptical that Tillerson will call out Russian aggression when he sees it. Russian complicity in the siege and ultimate destruction of the Syrian city of Aleppo is well documented. Russian forces, both on the ground and in the air, reduced that ancient city to rubble. In doing so, many innocent civilians were killed. All of this in support of the blood thirsty regime of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Surely, at some point, Tillerson has seen television reports and photographs of the devastation and suffering there. How else would he characterize what his Russian friend has done to the Syrian nation?
America needs a secretary of state who will represent not only the interests of the American people but also the values of our country. He must be able to call out evil when he sees it. He must be a spokesman for the weak and the defenseless whose governments care little for basic human rights. Rex Tillerson is not that man. We can only hope that senators like Rubio will stand up for, as he says, “what is right” and vote against Tillerson’s confirmation.
Carl A. Haberl
Washington