Without our reputation as a country that cares about human rights, respecting them in our own actions and advocating them globally, the United States loses its identity and becomes “just another superpower doing what’s necessary” to maintain its hegemony, Harold Hongju Koh, dean of the Yale Law School, told a Humphrey Institute audience Tuesday over the noon hour.

Koh, who in addition to his legal and academic work was an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton Administration, is a leading advocate for the international human rights agenda. He described the breakdown of the U.S. role on human rights during the Bush Administration as fundamental. In series of brilliant power point slides, Koh laid out the basic approach to human rights that the U.S. followed when it was doing things right, then a second set that showed how everything had been stood on its head.

I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with him, but to give you an idea of how it worked and admitting that these are paraphrases, he said that the proper approach to solving world conflicts was:

• Good human rights policy: Diplomacy, backed by the threat of force as a last resort. Bush policy: pre-emptive war, which is a resort to force before exhausting peaceful alternatives.
• Good human rights policy: Push for respect for human rights, based on universalism (in other words, the standards and expectations apply to everyone). Bush: Selective respect for selective human rights principles applied selectively to reward friends and punish enemies.
• Good human rights policy: Advocate for democratization of non-democracies but understand that it must come from the bottom up. Bush: Democratize by force and fiat from the top down.
• Good policy: Stand for effective international institutions even if it means U.S. can’t always get its way. Bush attack international institutions because respecting them might mean U.S. can’t get its way. (Koh said that only two two countries rejected the Conventions of the Rights of the Child, Somalia and the United States. “Somalia’s excuse is that they have no organized government. We have no excuse.”)
• Good human rights policy: Strategic multilateralism with tactical unilateralism (which I take to mean a sincere commitment to trying to get things done multilaterally, backed by a willing to go unilateral as a last resort for limited purposes. Bush: Strategic unilateralism with tactical multilateralism (announce early and often that while you would be happy to have allies and the backing of international organizations, the U.S. is going to do what it is going to do, allies, international law or not).
• Good policy: Tell the truth so the world knows it can believe you. Bush: Don’t.

Okay, you get the idea. Koh talked a lot about the torture cases, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, rendition, secret CIA prisons, calling them “self-inflicted wounds” to the U.S. reputation as a human rights model.

He slammed the Senate’s decision to confirm Michael Mukasey as attorney general after Mukasey finessed the question of whether water boarding was torture. He said that part of the Washington spin is to use word games and mind games to make easy distinctions look hard. They tell us that the definition of torture is ambiguous and that many practices fall into the grey area on the border. He mocked that idea. The definition of torture says that humiliating prisoners is torture. The obfuscators suggest that this is some kind of vague concept with fuzzy borders. Can anyone look at the pictures that came out of Abu Ghraib and not understand to a very high level of certainty that these prisoners were being humiliated. He said the same about the question of whether the interrogation technique known as water boarding is torture. Water boarding is designed to motivate a prisoner to talk by making him feel that he is drowning. If you wouldn’t want an interrogation technique used against your own captured soldiers, you aren’t supposed to use it against those you capture. If there any question of whether water boarding is torture? Koh asked rhetorically?

In previous election cycles (this is me talking, not Koh), George W. Bush was said to appeal to those who prefer “moral clarity,” while the Democrats were said to represent an effete weakness for moral relativism. There’s been a lot of water over that dam. Koh, calmly delivered a refreshing message of moral clarity for those who believe in human rights.

“Torture is not an acceptable practice,” he said. It’s illegal; it’s immoral and it’s counterproductive. It doesn’t make us sager. It makes us less safe because the more it’s used, the more people will want to commit terrorist acts against us.”

The international human rights system has lost its balance wheel,” Koh said. “The balance wheel was the United States.” He doesn’t seem to think that anything can take America’s place in that role, but he does believe that America can restore itself to that role.