Last month, after the capture of Saddam Hussein, the newly righteous Bush Administration, in its glorious zeal to prosecute Saddam's crimes against humanity, was being more than a little hypocritical - given that it continues to actively resist efforts to prosecute dictators and war criminals Bush and his predecessors have favored. From Chile's Augusto Pinochet to Rios Montt in Guatemala (see Troy Skeels' excellent cover article in ETS!! Vol. 8 No. 5) to certain gated communities in South Florida, they reside in luxurious retirement, living off their spoils, far removed from any spider holes or worries of execution. And, of course, their American handlers are not only safe from prosecution - many such handlers used their past crimes as resume builders for their current high-level Bush Administration positions.

The syndrome is one present in virtually every facet of US foreign policy. It even its own name: American exceptionalism. Do as we say, not as we do.

Now, we're seeing the economic corollary.

The occasion is the fallout from former Secretary of State James Baker's December trip through the financial capitals of Europe, asking the creditors of Britain and France and Germany and Russia to forgive Iraq its massive $120 billion foreign debt incurred under the reign of Saddam Hussein. The Bush Administration's rationale is seductive in its sensibility: the money went for the private use of Saddam's circles to enrich themselves and strengthen their grip on power. The money wasn't spent on or by the Iraqi people or their legitimately selected government. Therefore, a genuinely legitimate government shouldn't have to be responsible for the bill.

Somewhat astonishingly, Old Europe seems to be buying it. Literally. Both France and Germany have already agreed forgive part of their shares the debt, with more likely to come, and Russia may well follow suit. In terms of the Bush Administration's fiscal management of Iraq, this is far better news than it had a right to hope for, especially given that it had just told many of these same countries that their firms would be shut out of Iraq's US taxpayer-funded reconstruction gold rush.

As a precedent, this is wonderful news, and not just because of the idea that a kleptocracy's thefts should not be charged to its more legitimate successors. Set aside the reality that the US helped put Saddam into power in the first place, or that its current administration of Iraq is even less legitimate than Saddam's ascension was in the eyes of international law. In fact, the last time a country other than the US simply invaded a foreign country and took over its government, it was - uh, well, Saddam, actually, in Kuwait. Who says conservatives hate moral relativism?

But the matter of debt retirement and US exceptionalism runs far, far deeper than America's history with Saddam. By virtue of its wealth, the US controls most of the shots for international lending and credit, particularly through its voting control of the boards of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

The IMF, World Bank, and a bipartisan succession of US administrations have long insisted on honoring the past debts of illegitimate governments the US helped keep in power. These debts, especially the ones originally incurred in the '60s and '70s, were often originally of astonishing sums of money at high interest rates for dubious purposes. Three and four decades later, any number of countries in the global South now pay up to or even more than half of their national budgets servicing the interest--not even the principle - on these debts.

They include countries like Argentina, which has on several occasions teetered on the brink of default and whose IMF-assisted economy is, as a result, in ruins; its original debts were incurred, with American encouragement, by Argentine generals financing their "dirty war" of the mid-late '70s and up through their ill-fated invasion of the Falklands in 1982. Over that period, at least 30,000 Argentinians were "disappeared" while the generals bought pricy war toys and enriched themselves. America still insists the debt be paid.

Ditto the Philippines, where ordinary Filipinos are still paying the interest on money that went into prisons, purges, Ferdinand Marcos' Swiss bank accounts, and Imelda's shoes; the massive security apparatus - including the illegal nuclear, aka weapon-of-mass-destruction, program --of apartheid South Africa; the kleptocracies of any number of post-colonial African dictatorships; the generals in Brazil, Noriega in Panama, Suharto in Indonesia, the whole bloody lot of them in Pakistan. In every case, banks in New York and London and Paris and Tokyo and bureaucrats in Washington now effectively control national economies of countries they probably can't find on a map. And in each case, America doesn't want the debt forgiven.

This is not a minor issue. For a generation, foreign debt has been the primary lever by which wealthy creditors have forced social programs to be gutted, government services to be privatized, natural resources to be plundered, national wealth to be shipped ever northward, the poor to get much poorer, and the rich to get much, much, much richer. Thirty years ago, economists and politicians talked of "developing" poorer countries to bring them up to the living standards of wealthier countries. Nobody talks about that any longer. Amidst all the closed-bid contracts and Halliburton price gouging, it's barely been noticed that in Iraq, this sort of economic looting has already taken place over the past eight months. The Bush Administration has privatized Iraq's state resources to an extent never before seen in any poor country. Dubya can safely offer Iraq the prospect of "self-rule" next summer not only because the participating Iraqis will all be hand-picked by Washington, but because all the important policy decisions and most of the wealth has already been safely removed to the offices of Halliburton, Bechtel, big oil, and the like.

The common thread here is not a new US ideological commitment to the forgiveness of the debts of dictators; it's a commitment, as ever, to enriching the Bush White House's friends.

The problem is that the war crimes of Saddam and the economic crimes of his, or any, dictatorship are linked by more than the commonality of American exceptionalism. In country after country, as you read this, HIV-infected people die for lack of a public health care system; starvation and disease stalk economies with pandemic joblessness; and, of course, the small arms bought with all that debt wind up in the hands of militaries, paramilitaries, insurgencies, and death squads that are all too happy to use them on whomever.

Debt kills, as surely as Saddam or his ilk ever have. The death toll, in fact, is far higher - tens of millions in Africa alone.

The United States cannot, with any credibility, call for the trial of Saddam Hussein while it still protects people like Montt or Pinochet. Similarly, America cannot, with any credibility, seek retirement of Saddam's debts while US banks are still cashing, every month, desperate payments on the debts of dozens of other past national thieves.

In both cases, Bush Administration officials would love to present their Iraq policies as moral, enlightened, and compassionate. In both cases, they'll have to keep washing their hands a lot more to get all the blood off. Meantime, let's hope the forgiven precedent sticks, and not just because it would save countless lives in the global South. When it comes to trying to manage the damage caused by massive debts run up by an unelected regime, we'll need that charity, too.