Senior Fellow John R. Bolton

Having never been arrested anywhere by legitimate authorities, I was amused to learn some months ago that an illegitimate authority planned to arrest me when I spoke at the Hay Festival. George Monbiot, pretender to the throne of Monbiotshire, and assorted Hay camp followers were sufficiently outraged by a dissenting, non-Leftist voice sullying their muddy pleasures that they were spurred to action.

When I wrote Surrender Is Not an Option, the memoir of my tenure as US Ambassador to the United Nations, I learned that authors not only write their books, but also serve as their chief marketing officers. I had, therefore, dutifully done about one million interviews since the book's November 2007 publication, and saw Hay as one more brick in the marketing wall. To be honest, I had never heard of it before.

The would-be King George (George III in his later years comes to mind) believed I was a major architect of the Bush Administration's Iraq policy--thus proving, among other things, that he hadn't read my book. Since that's all that due process requires in Monbiotshire, he now had only to arrest the body and take it back down his rabbit hole.

In the event, I appeared at Hay, answered an hour's worth of questions and left the stage before King George could lay a hand on me. The Welsh constabulary was most helpful, actually having a little fun. Being an American, I asked one policeman if he was armed; he smiled and said: "I might be." I felt even more secure. As I drove out of the western badlands of Wales, King George and his subjects pursued me, but got stuck in Hay's copious supplies of mud. Ta-ta, as the locals say. The affair might be chalked up as nothing more than a publicity stunt for Hay, given that Monbiot writes for The Guardian, the festival's sponsor. On the other hand, there was an underlying element of menace that would become apparent if the criminalisation of policy disagreements became more widespread.

In the case of the "citizen's arrest", the pernicious idea is that, based on their own moral self-evaluation, people can take the law into their own hands and determine who is a criminal. At a minimum, this approach is intended to deny legitimacy in the public square to opposing points of view, and taken to the next level--the threat or use of physical force--is intended to intimidate those views into silence. This is, in the worst case, the path first to anarchy and then to fascism.

Representative government's central benefit is that competing viewpoints openly debate, with the majority view ultimately prevailing. In the United Kingdom, a majority in Parliament supported the Iraq war, deeming it both correct and lawful. Obviously, many disagreed, and they are perfectly entitled to express their views and continue working to reverse the relevant parliamentary decisions. What they are not entitled to do in a free, constitutional society is to use the techniques of force and intimidation. Although Monbiot's attempt at a "citizen's arrest" falls into the category of farce, more sustained and serious efforts along those lines are the basis of tragedy. No responsible citizenry should allow this cancerous view to take hold.

But even beyond the elementary distinction between legitimate and illegitimate citizen action is the critical question of limits on governmental action in democratic societies. Having failed to handcuff me, Monbiot announced he was going after bigger game: former Prime Minister Tony Blair, leader of the Iraq "war party" in Britain, now analogised to 20th century fascist leaders who launched wars of aggression. Let's be clear: this analogy is nonsense. Blair advocated his views in a democratic society, and his views prevailed. He did not impose anything on anyone. Many may see his policies as wrong, even disastrously so, but he is guilty only of superior political leadership, not crimes against humanity. A free society's punishment for political leaders who lose their support is turning them out of office. Comparing Blair to Hitler is not merely the fallacy of moral equivalence, but outright moral blindness.

Even more fragile is the claim, made under the rubric of "universal jurisdiction," to try the leaders of other countries for "war crimes". Apart from the laughably hubristic character of countries like Belgium, or the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, asserting universal jurisdiction over the entire world, the moral imperialism of the assertion betrays its basic weakness. Power without accountability is as unacceptable when it purportedly serves a "higher" moral authority as the reverse. That is what happens when the odd magistrate in Spain--or the United Kingdom--decides to arrest a foreign leader for alleged crimes unrelated to the arresting country.

All of this may simply be a passing fad, or it may be part of a larger trend, evident for decades in Washington, to criminalise political differences. Not every political mistake is equivalent to Watergate, not every misstatement is perjury and not every disagreement is evidence of the other party's venality. If we fail to grasp this point, our free societies will see serious trouble ahead.

John R. Bolton is a senior fellow at AEI.