Pragmatism trumps principle

David Hicks - just a trivial piece of collateral damage

After more than four years of doing hard time at the Guantanamo Bay US military prison in Cuba, David Hicks will get his day in court soon. That’s the only message to be gleaned from the fact that the Prime Minister John Howard and the Foreign Minister Alexander Downer are finally making noises that the US needs to get a wriggle on regarding its treatment of Hicks.

Until now the Australian Government has declined to make any negative public comments regarding the shabby treatment of an Australian citizen by the US. This has changed following the US Supreme Court ruling last week that the military commissions established by the US administration to prosecute Hicks and hundreds of others were illegal.

But don’t be conned into thinking that the changed stance by the Australian Government has anything to do with the legalities or ethics of Hicks’ detention. It is all about pragmatics. The Australian Government has known all along that Hicks’ detention was illegal. It did not criticise the US simply because it took the view that the welfare of Hicks wasn’t worth a diplomatic stoush with our closest foreign ally - the US.

They were right. International relations is a complex activity. You have got to know when to push and when to back off. Australia’s relationship with the US is its most important global connection. In dollar terms, the relationship is unquantifiable.

Was the Howard Government going to risk souring this by throwing a hissy fit at the treatment of one of its citizen who preferred to spend his spare time training with terrorists as opposed to watching the footy? Not likely.

Which is why the constant rhetoric by lawyer groups and civil libertarians over the past four years to rescue “Aussie David” was uninformed in the extreme.

When the global stakes are high, international law goes out the door. It always has and always will. The most cardinal prohibition in international law is the prohibition of the use of force against another state. Since World War II the US has used force against another state on more than 30 occasions - the most notable examples being South Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Cambodia, Grenada, Afghanistan and Iraq (twice).

Arguably, some of these interventions were lawful. Almost certainly some were not, such as Nicaragua and the second Iraq campaign. Despite this, the sum total of the adverse consequences that have been imposed against the US, as a result of the implementation of international law, is zero. This reveals a fundamental shortcoming of the international law system - it is more akin to a system of etiquette, rather than a prescriptive set of rules.

The US locked up Hicks and more than 400 prisoners without trial in Guantanamo Bay for over four years for two reasons. First, because it wanted to make an example of them - get on the wrong side of the “war on terror” and you’ll come to regret it. Second, it kept them there because it could.

The current US military and economic dominance is unrivalled in human history. For the first time in memory we have a world which is totally dominated by a sole military power. As noted by Former Judge of the International Court of Justice, C.G. Weeramantry:

Never has it occurred before that one single nation has been universally looked upon as the world's leader, the pre-eminent power of the world. Not the Egyptians or the Persians or the Greeks or the Romans, not the Portuguese or the Spanish or the Dutch, not the Germans, the Japanese or anybody else ever had this universal recognition. No nation in history ever had this position, suddenly descending on it, of being the universally acknowledged superpower of the world.

Given that the Federal Government are now publicly making comments that Hicks should be tried before a regular court or tribunal, you can be pretty confident that this has nothing to do with a new found deep sense of sympathy for Hicks’ plight. More likely, the Government has had high level diplomatic representations from the US that the US has no more use for Hicks. They’ve punished him enough: lesson taught, he can go home now.

This means that when Hicks gets his day in court or is simply released the Federal Government can gloat about the size of its sympathy gland and influence with the US. In truth, it will have nothing to do with the persuasion of the Australian Government.

That’s not to be critical of the Federal Government. It was right not to strain our relationship with the US because of Hicks. It is regrettable that Hicks has been treated so poorly by the US and denied a right to a fair and expeditious trial.

But as usual, pragmatics wins the day. War is a terrible thing, especially because it always causes high levels of collateral damage. The war on terror has resulted in more than 30,000 Iraqi civilians alone being killed. This has caused unthinkable levels of pain and devastation.

Another form of collateral damage that often happens in wars is that suspected enemy combatants do more than their fair share of hard time. Yet, in the big scheme of things, the harm sustained by Hicks is piffle compared to the tens of thousands that have lost their lives.

So all those commentators that have been howling for the release of Hicks, it is time for a perspective check. Your sympathy gland is, at least relatively speaking, over-bloated and it’s time for a history lesson - in times of war, pragmatism always trumps principle.

It is no response to suggest that we should show more compassion to the plight of Hicks than the other victims of the war of terror. That would be downright racism - which is part of the reason we are in the mess that is Iraq II in the first place. Aussie lives are no more important than those of Iraqis.

Moreover, unlike Hicks who was deranged enough to voluntarily leave our opulent country to train with terrorists, the only contribution Iraqi citizens who have been killed in the war made to their demise is that they happened to be born in a strife torn land.

So yes, Hicks deserves a bit of your sympathy, but relatively speaking it is a negligible amount - certainly not enough to merit the near saturation media coverage that he has been receiving.