Reclaiming Human Rights?

The Washington Post offers an interesting challenge to the State department memo insisting that the hallmark of the U.S. foreign policy will be "upholding human rights." As Glenn Kessler (from the post) points out, this does not address the violations caused by "the support of nations with less-than-stellar records on democracy" or the "credibility issue" of the use of outsourcing torture or prison abuse. I wonder though if the bigger issue isn't what the administration touts as crowning achievements in human rights but that they are so very capable of co-opting the rhetoric and posturing of advancing human rights while simultaneously violating them? Is this a sort of Vietnam syndrome in which a U.S. soldier commented (infamously) that they had to destroy a village in order to save it? How does a nation advance human rights by increasing arms trades, increasing weapons manufacturing, increasing debt, underfunding and undermining social programs (here and abroad), waging pre-emptive war (and thus setting one HELL of a precedent), "detaining" indefinately possible terror suspects and sanctioning, bombing and working countless other human beings to death? How does that promote human rights? How does that add up to a viable humanistic diplomacy?

Will the UN be the space in which a universal vision of human rights is realized? Is this possible given the ability of those with the most military, economic and political power to manipulate, use and abuse the rhetoric of human rights in actions that seem anything but humane? What needs to change to reconcile these two "visions" of what human rights means and how "upholding" human rights is accomplished?