September 27, 2006

Rules Apply to U.S. As Well

 

The recent flak over the administration’s proposed changes in its interpretation of the Geneva Convention demonstrates core limitations in its approach – our current leadership’s apparent view that the United States has unlimited power to impose its view of right and wrong on the rest of the world, and need not pay attention to the impact of what we do on the international system as a whole.

 

Nurturing and strengthening the systems that they pretend to lead is a crucial role for leaders. Teams, organizations, countries and even the international system of countries are strongest when leaders and members observe shared norms of conduct. This is why we encourage management and work teams and institutions to adopt clear ground-rules, and why serious partnerships and alliances of all kinds do the same.

 

Adversaries also have guidelines to maintain parameters around their differences or competition. Even enemies in war adopt and maintain rules, such as respect for the white flag of surrender. Leaders must nurture the norms that will help systems to be predictable and resilient. Systems are only strong when all or most members follow their rules.

 

The administration self-righteously maintains that these (and many other) rules should not apply to us, in part because our current enemies want to destroy us, as if most enemies in war do not desire to destroy their foes. They also claim that the rules need not apply to us because we are morally superior to our enemies.

 

The president responds to questions about the impact of our changes in the Geneva Convention on the behavior of our adversaries with righteous indignation. How dare anyone equate our torture of prisoners with the torture of our prisoners by our enemies! After all, we are good, so the torture we inflict is good torture, or perhaps holy torture. While the torture inflicted by our enemies is evidence of their evil nature. Many of these positions boil down to some version of “We are good, and they are evil.”

 

This approach is the exact opposite of what is required - a focus on behavior, rather than on who is doing it. Widely accepted rules of conduct and procedures for people with diverse experiences and world views are at the heart of the American system, and the nature of civilization itself, of which our president touts us as the supreme role model. Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham is quoted in Time Magazine on the topic, “It (punishment for military misbehavior) has to be based on what the person did and not who the person is.”

 

Effective systems are based on the Kantian Imperative –that we must act in ways such that it is in everyone’s best interest for all to act in the same way. This doesn’t necessarily imply moral equivalence, only common sense. Acceptable behavior must be clearly defined. If it isn’t, limited understanding might have us misinterpret others’ intentions, as some Iraqis might misinterpret our good intentions when our actions kill innocent civilians. Behavior gives us something to discuss and agree on. After all, others may not see themselves as the embodiment of evil when we do, and may see their own intentions also as good.

 

The bottom line is that the ‘our way or the highway’ type of ‘moral clarity’ that is practiced by this administration, aside from being arrogant, has the possibility to influence others’ behavior only when the definer of moral rightness has the over-riding power to impose its view of the world. It has become painfully clear that in today’s world we don’t have this level of power over other countries and peoples, if indeed we ever did. That makes this approach ineffective and dangerous for us, in addition to morally weak.

 

Our choice is to adapt to these changing power relationships and maintain our position as a strong and leading country of the world, or remain in denial about these changes and maintain approaches that require power that we don’t have, and risk becoming much, much weaker in many ways.

 

Implementing unilateral changes in international prisoner agreements, created through great effort more than 50 years ago, while expecting, or at least claiming, that these changes will not erode the agreements is just incredible. It must be a product of a total lack of understanding of how large systems work, or a remnant of an image of American power in the world, that doesn’t exist, and perhaps never did.