Whenever governments lose moral authority, as when their police seize evidence in violation of the Constitution, their case for conviction suffers. As the late US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis said, government must remain the "omnipresent teacher" of our highest ideals.
In the Abu Ghraib scandal, the army and the Bush administration have hardly been good teachers, and the public and the media have also been complicit. How, then, can the collectively guilty bring charges and single out some suspects as individually guilty?
ILLUSTRATION MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
To be sure, the extent of collective liability for torture and other indecencies invites debate. Should the public's appropriate reaction be guilt or shame? Many have read and seen enough to feel acute shame about being part of a nation that could go to war with righteous rationales and end up replicating, if not aggravating, the abuses of the "rogue state" Americans called their enemy.
Guilt is based, they say, on what we do; shame, on who we are. Neither the vast majority of US soldiers nor Americans as individuals have done anything wrong in Iraq (apart from the invasion itself), and thus might balk at allegations of collective guilt for the atrocities.
Yet in other cases of collective action, we willingly affirm collective guilt and a shared duty to make reparations. This was the widely accepted approach toward German liability for the Holocaust, and there are many who urge the same approach toward America's responsibility for slavery.
Yet shame might be more plausible with regard to US behavior in Iraq. The source of that shame is not any particular act, but simply being part of a nation that could behave so arrogantly as to disregard international law and the UN by invading a country that was not threatening America, and then sending untrained military police to keep prisoners in line by any means they happen to devise.
One way to think about guilt versus shame is to begin with the response that fits our sentiment of responsibility. Guilt represents a debt. The proper response to such a debt is to suffer punishment or to pay reparations to the victims.
Shame invites a retreat from the public eye. If you are ashamed, you do not expose yourself to punishment, nor do you extend your hand in a gesture of repair. When you are ashamed, you cannot bear the critical gaze of others: you hold your head low.
Though US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld proposed compensation to the victims of abuse at American military hands, it is hard to see this offer as expressing either guilt or shame. The offer seems more like an effort to buy silence.
If compensation were coupled with a finding of high-level American wrongdoing, we would get closer to an act of atonement. In recent weeks, attention has focused on whether Rumsfeld should resign or be fired. It is not clear what this would accomplish in light of the secretary's declaration that he would resign not as an expression of guilt, but only if he can no longer be "effective."
Under these circumstances, one can see why people yearn for international criminal prosecutions of responsible politicians.
For good or for ill, the political power of the US makes it immune to prosecution. Even if the UN Security Council could establish an ad hoc tribunal to try the abuses of American officials in Iraq, this would still address only the guilt of individuals, not the problem of each American's own responsibility for having participated, directly and indirectly, in a culture that generated the torture of prisoners.
Another reason why guilt does not capture our situation is that the collective debt must be owed to some coherent collective entity, such as the Jewish people in the Holocaust. But Iraq has already degenerated into so many rival factions that apart from the abused prisoners, there is no identifiable entity America has wronged and to whom it is indebted.
Peculiarly, President Bush first apologized for the atrocities in the presence of King Abdullah of Jordan, as though the crime had been committed against Jordanian Arabs. The king of Jordan would not have been in a position to forgive even a truly contrite Bush, and therefore he was not the proper audience for the confession.
If guilt is problematic in this context, we are left to struggle with collective shame. The problem is how to respond.
Americans have few choices but to discover a form of modesty appropriate to the country's reduced status in the eyes of the world. One immediate consequence would be to abandon the US attempt to prosecute Saddam Hussein on its own and to invoke an international tribunal.
The longer-range consequence of this new modesty should be for Americans to become enthusiastic supporters not only of the UN but of the International Criminal Court. American shame would be salutary if it led Americans to realize that they live in an interdependent world where nations cannot undertake unilateral military adventures without suffering unexpected disasters.
US President George W. Bush and the complicit American people sought glory in Iraq. What Americans have secured is merely a lasting stain on their reputation as decent and law-abiding people.
George Fletcher is a jurisprudence professor at Columbia University and author of Romantics at War: Glory and Guilt in the Age of Terrorism. Copyright: Project Syndicate
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US