A Strange Morality

The United States, a nation born of rules and law--its Constitution written and revered--is forever perplexed by the jungle beyond the seas. We Americans are always looking for moral order abroad to parallel the moral order at home. Alas, we never find it.

General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, former dictator of Chile, is arrested in a London clinic on a human-rights warrant. For Americans, a conundrum. Instinctively we think this must be right. If in America you were responsible directly or indirectly for 3,000 deaths, you'd be on death row. But Americans are not arbitrary. All kinds of thugs, both former and current rulers, are running around free. So why Pinochet?

There is, for example, a whole generation of Soviet officials who put perfectly sane dissidents into psychiatric prisons and presided over that hell called the gulag. Those officials are not just running around the world. Some of them are still running Russia.

Take Laurent Kabila, dictator of the Congo. He is suspected of involvement in the disappearance of tens of thousands of innocents--far more than the worst of what Pinochet is charged with. His fate? While Pinochet was under house arrest in London, Kabila was in Paris, a guest at a Franco-African summit.

Where is justice? The answer, one that Americans instinctively resist, is that there is no justice. The international arena is a Hobbesian state of nature, a world of ad hoc rulemaking where anarchy is tempered only by the rule of the bully. It must be so. In any social system--whether of individuals or nation-states--where there is no enforcer, there can be no real law.

How to make moral sense of how America treats its local dictators? We ease "Baby Doc" Duvalier out of power in Haiti and into a chateau in southern France, and we send the Haitian generals to a comfortable retirement in Panama. Manuel Noriega, Panama's onetime strongman, languishes in a Florida prison. The other thugs remain free. Why does Noriega rot while the others bask?

In the end it is power, not justice, that determines who gets arrested. Noriega was no worse than the Haitian dictators. He was certainly far less a killer, torturer and oppressor than Fidel Castro, who is the toast of every capital he visits. And he is a piker beside the butchers of Tiananmen Square, who are received with deference everywhere they go.

Amid this moral chaos, the arrest of Pinochet is a triumph of arbitrariness. Well, no. There is one rule that emerges from this case. The moralists, so jubilant at Pinochet's comeuppance, might ponder its perversity: rulers with blood on their hands are advised to remain in power. For any tyrant, the best protection from the kind of justice being visited upon Pinochet is to continue to tyrannize.

After all, Pinochet never would have been arrested if he had not done the right thing: giving up power in 1990 to a democratic government, after holding a free election. His reward? Pursuit by moral preeners up and down Europe who think they have established some new international norm of morality.