A s Justice Felix Frankfurter once wrote, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.” So now is not the time to criticize President Bush for insisting, for more than four years, that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the hundreds of suspected enemy combatants held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere in the world. Nor is it the time to rue the years wasted as the administration defended that position until the Supreme Court rejected it last month in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

Instead, now is a time to commend the Bush administration for promising to comply with the Geneva Conventions, thus taking a first step toward regaining some of the prestige and respect lost at home and abroad because of its decision to thumb its nose at international law. And it is also time to recall that, through more than two centuries, the United States generally has worked to promote international law — not out of mushy-headed idealism, but because of a hard-headed judgment that advancing the rule of law worldwide serves the national interest.

The Geneva Conventions — a package of four treaties signed in 1949 to govern the treatment of wartime captives — reflect that understanding of international law. Few Americans know the details of those treaties, but most probably recognize them as generally embodying humanitarian policies that the United States itself can invoke to safeguard U.S. service members held abroad as wartime captives.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made that point in urging the Senate to ratify the treaties in 1955. More recently, Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who spent five-and-a-half years in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp, told a Red Cross audience in 1999 that he and his colleagues in the Hanoi Hilton would have been “a lot worse off” without the Geneva Conventions.

Bush and others are right, of course, that al Qaeda is not a party to the treaties and that its terrorist tactics — targeting civilians, taking hostages and so forth — mock the treaties’ provisions and its aspirations. But the president was wrong on legal and policy grounds alike that the treaties did not bind the United States in the conflict with al Qaeda.

As a matter of law, the treaties were written — with World War II atrocities fresh in mind — to strengthen the protections for captured combatants. Most provisions deal with warfare between nation-states. As Justice John Paul Stevens explained, however, the so-called Common Article 3 — common, that is, to all four treaties — was written precisely to require signatory nations to extend minimal protections to combatants in other types of wars.

The list is short, but hardly controversial. Most notably, Article 3 prohibits “humiliating or degrading treatment” and requires the use of “regularly constituted” courts that afford “all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

As a matter of policy, the administration has not furthered U.S. interests nor honored American values by claiming a right to circumvent those obligations. “Al Qaeda does all sorts of things that we don’t do,” says John Murphy, an international law expert at Villanova University Law School. “But these protections are based on humanitarian considerations that the civilized world thinks are necessary.”

Moreover, on the most practical grounds, the legal fight over the military commissions Bush established has contributed to protracted delays in bringing any of the detainees to trial. Even acknowledging the difficulties in compiling evidence and preparing charges, it’s astounding that no detainee has been brought to trial more than four-and-a-half years after Guantánamo was opened.

The administration may not have learned its lesson, however. The Justice and Defense Department lawyers who testified before Congress last week signaled the administration’s intention to try to preserve many or most of the features of the military tribunals that the justices faulted as likely violations of either the Geneva Conventions or the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or both.

Among the defects Stevens cited were excluding the accused and their civilian counsel from some parts of proceedings and allowing use of hearsay and even coerced testimony. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy also noted that the tribunals — unlike regular courts-martial — were not to be independent and their members not necessarily military lawyers.

With their general provisions, the Geneva Conventions and the military justice code give Bush and Congress some flexibility in designing new tribunals. Taking their cue from the high court itself, administration officials are saying that the Hamdan decision provides “an opportunity” for the political branches to work together on crafting the best policy.

The opportunity had been there since 2001 if the administration had only wanted. “Collaboration is better than unilateral action,” GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told the administration witnesses last week. With the Supreme Court’s help, perhaps Bush can now recognize the wisdom of that view — and act on it.

Kenneth Jost is the Supreme Court editor for CQ Press.