Recently I talked with a very decent, earnest man, a civil servant in the State Department. His job is ''public diplomacy.'' He tries to explain and justify U.S. foreign policy to people in other countries.

I told him he had a very hard job. Every poll in the last few years shows a huge drop in the United States' image in the world.

And that was before last week, when the U.S. government approved a program that allows the shooting down of civilian aircraft and two days later indicted three Cuban military officers for shooting down two civilian aircraft:

• On Tuesday, the United States gave its blessing to a program -- known in bureaucratic doublespeak as the ''Airbridge Denial Program'' -- that allows Colombian fighter pilots to shoot down unarmed civilian aircraft suspected of carrying drugs. The program was suspended two years ago after an American missionary and her infant daughter were killed when their plane was mistaken for a drug plane. U.S. officials say now there are sufficient safeguards to prevent a similar tragedy.

Notwithstanding, as Michael L. Evans, director of the Colombia Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, wrote Thursday in The Herald, the program ignores international law. The International Civil Aviation Organization's rule holds that governments ''must refrain from resorting to the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight.'' The State Department's own legal advisor wrote that the ``prohibition applies whether or not the aircraft in question is suspected of engaging in criminal activity.''

He also wrote: ``Mistakes are likely to occur under any policy that contemplates the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight, even as a last resort.''

• On Thursday, the U.S. government indicted for murder two Cuban fighter pilots and the former head of the country's air force for shooting down two unarmed Brothers to the Rescue civilian aircraft in international waters near Cuban air space, resulting in four deaths.

The Cuban government claims the action was justified because Brothers to the Rescue aircraft had engaged in repeated violations of Cuban air space and posed a danger to safety and national security. But the planes were unarmed civilian aircraft, and when the United States took the case to the International Civil Aviation Organization, the body ruled against the Cuban government.

Of course, the cases are not exactly equivalent. The missionaries' plane was shot down by mistake, while the Brothers to the Rescue plane was shot down on purpose.

And drug dealers are not comparable to political protesters.

But the shooting down of civilian aircraft is a violation of international aviation rules no matter who is on board. The differences in the cases do not make the glaring inconsistency in the U.S. position any less evident -- or any less familiar. It's another instance -- though not as dramatic as Iraq or global warming -- in which our government resorts to international organizations and laws when it agrees with the position and ignores them when it doesn't.

It is this double standard that infuriates so many people in the world: insisting others play by the rules, while we bend them at will because we can.

In the short run, the United States has enough force to make up the rules as it goes along, as it did when it went into Iraq. But, as the Iraq case shows, the cost of defying the rules and the international community is steep. Even megapowers need friends.

The Lone Ranger always prevails in the movies. In the real world, there are a lot more Indians.

Copyright 1996-2003 Knight Ridder

###