Living by the Rules

One of the greatest teachers I encountered while doing postgraduate studies in the United States during the heady 1960’s was Saul Alinsky the pioneer of community organisation and the author of Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals. I attended some of his lectures, probably better described as virtuoso performances, at Brendeis University. In Rules for Radicals, Rule Four is ‘Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules’ for as Alinsky comments, ‘they can no more obey their own rules than the church can live up to Christianity’. He was fond of pointing out that those who ‘publicly pose as the custodians of responsibility, morality, law and justice (which are frequently strangers to each other)’ should be constantly ‘pushed to live up to their own book of morality and regulations’. He saw this as an effective tactic in situations where power is being abused.

This week has seen the Bush administration challenged once more to demonstrate that it lives up to its own book of rules. At the beginning of the week we were treated to George Galloway, one of the UK’s most flamboyant and outspoken Members of Parliament, lambasting the Senate committee investigating the oil-for-food scandal. Those of us used to his aggressive style and unwavering opposition to the war in Iraq knew what to expect and had eagerly looked forward to the encounter. Members of the committee appeared somewhat nonplussed by the barrage that George unleashed in response to allegations that he had personally benefited to the extent of two million barrels of Saddam’s oil. First George called into question the ‘kangaroo court’ travesty of American justice; ‘I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever having written to me or telephoned me, without any contact with me whatsoever, and you call that justice’. Then he wanted to know what evidence there was against him, and when this turned out to be his name on a piece of paper given in evidence by two Iraqi officials who are currently prisoners of the US forces, George launched into an attack on the illegality of the war in Iraq in particular, and the immorality of the occupying US forces in general.

There were some classic moments in his testimony, none more so than when he was asked how often he had met Saddam Hussein. ‘I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him’, George said. ‘The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try to bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war.’ At one level this was a wonderful piece of televised theatre in which a man who has consistently opposed the war argued forcefully that what the committee was involved in was not a judicial enquiry but rather, having got practically everything about the Iraq situation wrong, yet another attempt by the administration to justify its actions. But at a far deeper level, it was one lone person taking on the US government and challenging it to live by its own book or rules in terms of the pursuit of justice and truth.

The situation had not improved for the US by the end of the week when a British tabloid published photos which to the Arab and Muslim world were degrading, of Saddam Hussein in his underwear. In general, comment in the British media characterised the photographs as a breach of human rights and contrary to the Geneva Convention. The newspaper publishing the photographs said they had been leaked by a military source as a way of indicating to insurgent groups in Iraq that Saddam was a broken man, thus somehow undermining insurgent resolve. This is a fundamental misreading of the Iraqi mind and situation typical of the American regime. Many UK commentators focussed however, on something else – the way that the US administration cried foul when the Arab satellite TV station al-Jazeera (about which I wrote last week) paraded American prisoners of the Iraq war before the world, complaining that the provisions of the Geneva Convention were not being observed. If they were not being observed then, they were also not being observed this week. That the administration was well aware that it was not in this instance living by its own book of rules, became clear when the President backed an ‘aggressive’ investigation into the leaking of the pictures.

But the situation was compounded this morning when it was revealed that the President of Afghanistan has called for an enquiry into the way that prisoners of war were being treated by US forces in that country. This was prompted by the leaking of a military investigation into the killing of two detainees. Coming in the wake of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and the testimony of British Muslims formerly held in Guantanamo Bay about the degradation, abuse and torture they were forced to undergo, this Bagram Base incident in which two young Afghans were tortured, chained to the roof of their cells and left to die, appears to break all the rules of humanity and decency. It is easy to place the blame on the military psyche which is trained to treat the enemy as someone less than human, who can be abused and tortured in order to gain significant information which will assist the cause. I think there is some truth in this but there is also the question of the way all humanity is compromised when those in power cynically abandon the rules which they insist lie at the heart of concepts like freedom, justice and democracy.

For Saul Alinsky it is the superior strength of the powerful which becomes their undoing when they are pushed to live by their own book of rules. I’m grateful to George Galloway for reminding me once again that the arrogance of power can so easily be hoist by its own petard.