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Recently I attended a meeting between Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and a renowned Arab advocate of democracy who was taking a risk at home merely by meeting a Bush administration official. This brave man expressed gratitude for President Bush's commitment to democracy in the Muslim world. But he also pointedly told Wolfowitz that the administration's own willingness to compromise human rights in fighting terror is undermining its campaign for liberty in the Middle East. "Every dictator in the region is pointing to America's example as an excuse to crack down on dissent," he said.

The Supreme Court will soon consider key cases arising from the war on terror, including whether U.S. courts have jurisdiction to review detentions at Guantanamo Bay and the legality of imprisoning "enemy combatants" indefinitely without charges. The court will rule based on American constitutional principles. But it should also consider what its rulings will mean for the reputation of those principles around the world. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has said, America's "ability to act as a rule-of-law model for other nations" should be a consideration for the Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, America's image as a "rule-of-law model" has been tarnished, especially in the Muslim world. Last year a Pew survey found that significant majorities of Arabs want multiparty elections, freedom of speech and the press, and independent courts. Yet, when asked if they like "American ideas about democracy," large majorities from Morocco to Jordan to Pakistan said no. They no longer associate America with the principles it promotes.

The reasons are complex. But it doesn't help when, as in a November speech, President Bush eloquently denounces the Syrian government for leaving its people "a legacy of torture, oppression, misery and ruin," even as we learn that in 2002 the United States sent a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria for interrogation, naively trusting Syrian "assurances" that he would not be tortured. Nor does it help when the State Department criticizes Muslim countries for detaining people outside normal judicial processes, even as President Bush asserts the right to detain forever -- without judicial review -- anyone he deems a terrorist.

A State Department spokesman urged the government of Azerbaijan last month to release or charge opposition activists arrested in protests there. A reporter asked if that principle applied to the detainees in Guantanamo Bay or just to Azerbaijan. The spokesman had no answer, and when Azerbaijan came up at the department briefing the next day, the "charge or release" formulation was dropped. Similarly, a U.S. diplomat in Malaysia recently told Human Rights Watch that "we can't really say much" about the indefinite detention of government opponents in that country because of Guantanamo Bay.

When I speak to Arab journalists about American efforts to promote human rights in their societies, they inevitably bring up issues such as these. Governments in the Middle East increasingly respond the same way. And I cannot simply reply that, unlike Egypt or Algeria, the U.S. government is not using terrorism as a pretext to arrest political dissidents, because the Bush administration is asserting a degree of authority that would, in principle, permit it to do just that.

The administration would respond that in a war, under commonly accepted principles of international law, it has the right to detain fighters without trial until hostilities end. That is indeed true when it comes to genuine combatants captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. But in applying that principle to people arrested in the United States, such as terrorist suspect Jose Padilla, the administration is saying that the whole world is a battlefield in the war on terror and that anyone the chief executive deems a terrorist is a combatant, liable to be held indefinitely without charge. If that principle were, in fact, broadly accepted, Russia could apply it to any Chechen seized anywhere in the world whom it presumes to be a terrorist. China could apply it to dissident Uighurs and Tibetans. And America could not complain.

Another counterargument is that repressive governments would behave badly anyway, whatever America did at home. But America's example matters greatly. We need only recall what the Bush administration promotes as its model for the democratization of the Middle East: the transformation of Eastern Europe after the Cold War.

When America stood up for freedom in countries such as Poland and Hungary, their communist governments urged their people to reject U.S. meddling. But ordinary Poles and Hungarians were happy for America to interfere, because they saw the United States as a credible champion of their democratic aspirations. Most Arabs, on the other hand, do not look to America as a role model or friend. Their leaders can thus exploit popular resentment of America to deflect U.S. calls for democracy.

Moral clarity about human rights in the Middle East is not enough. The United States needs moral authority to promote its goals.

If President Bush will not restore it, let's hope the Supreme Court will.

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