In the first day or two after revelations of American prisoner abuse in Iraq exploded on the world, television cameras captured the angry reaction of “the Arab street.” Among the messages demonstrators sent was a placard which read something like: “What’s the difference between Saddam and Bush? Nothing!” This was a powerful point, meant to hit America where it hurt. But let me suggest two important differences between the ousted dictator and the incumbent president.

The first contrast is not in Bush’s favor: the hypocrisy factor. Under both leaders, “guards” have mistreated prisoners for purposes of interrogation – in some instances at the very same locations. The essential difference here comes in the realm of professions. Not exactly to his credit, Saddam Hussein made no pretensions of his regime’s regard for human rights, or determination to spread democracy and human values beyond – or even within – its borders. The Bush administration is abundantly on record to the contrary on this point, of course.

In political terms especially, it is this gap between profession and practice that matters. To be sure, to the Hussein regime, torture was normal practice, not “abuse”; whereas U.S. government officials have moved swiftly to denounce and investigate what they have defined as prisoner abuse. And even the outrages documented so far at U.S.-run prisons from Iraq to Afghanistan pale in comparison to the atrocities perpetrated at Saddam’s murderous prisons. But our earlier proclamations of our noble mission in Iraq drown out any attempts to delineate between levels of brutality.

In this regard, the closest geopolitical parallel from our history might be the disjunction between slavery and freedom in the United States. Slavery, of course, was an ancient, even normative, labor and social system, practiced throughout the Western Hemisphere well into – in many cases deep into – the nineteenth century. And the U.S. slave population was the only one in the New World which grew naturally. Many people at the time and since have thus compared the Old South’s slave regime with other contemporary regimes and concluded that it was “mild.” Leaving aside the question of what constitutes “mild” (physical conditions are far from the only measure), this begs the question: what’s the big deal about American slavery, given this comparative perspective?

The short answer is that American slavery was uniquely reprehensible only after the American Revolution. For that Revolution produced the proclamations to the world that ours was a country based on liberty and equality. Our slavery was not a new thing under the sun, but these pretensions – put forward as the very fabric of the American Republic – were, and the glaring gap justifiably drew forth condemnation at home and abroad.

Whether in the 18th or the 19th or the 21st century, the United States simply cannot put itself forward as the standard bearer of liberty and human rights, and then expect sheepish whimpers that “everyone does it” to palliate gross contradictions of that stance. No one can claim to be setting new standards and then try to be judged by the old ones.

But lest anyone think Americans have a corner on inconsistency, consider another difference between Saddam and Bush. Hussein’s appalling human rights record was well known, in its outlines, for decades. Where was the outrage on “the Arab street” then, as there is now? Why didn’t Saddam’s diplomats need to do “damage control” with other Arab governments for his abuse of their fellow Muslims, as Colin Powell and his subordinates are now having to do?

Seeing the world only through the lens of “us vs. them” is hardly unique to Arabs. But in this case as in others, it has created shameful sanctimoniousness. Surely there is enough to go around here. But while the hypocrisy factor cuts both ways, it seems to be the real answer to that placard broadcast around the world.