Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

This is one area where I am more skeptical than are you:

"Why must America construct its own war-crimes court when the world seems content with the ICC?"

Because the world is primarily interested in process and not in punishment, much less justice.

There is something more than a little askew with the operative moral calculus of international legal elites when figures like Pinochet, as bad as he was, rated more highly for energetic attempts prosecution than Khmer Rouge genocidaires. Or Hutu militia genocidaires. Nuremburg ain't their idea of a good outcome - unlike Milosevic, the top Nazis did not die of old age and ill-health while making a circus of the court proceedings. A few were acquitted, some were imprisoned and many were hanged.

Not that the Bush administration have done anything but discredit the implementation of national justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity, I grant you that. How do you screw up a trial of Saddam Hussein or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ??? That really takes a gifted level of incompetence to pull that off.

At the pre-9/11 creation of the ICC, the US should never have feared its jurisdiction. At that time, the fact that the ICC is only complementary to national due process, was widely ignored, despite it being the most important safeguard against frivolous indictments against 'civilized' and mature judicial systems. However, the inventionary pre nups now make sense as it is quite clear as to what substantive rules, not process, the ICC will apply to cases. A lot of countries in the world disagree with the US on what rules of war should apply to terrorists/terrorisme and Gap countries. On the other hand, given the US's track record on procesuting terrorists, its fear of process is now also justified...

The main cause of WW2 (60 million deaths) was thought to be the harmful intrusion of national politics into global economics. The international community therefore attempted to prevent a repeat by creating the Bretton Woods Institutions - most notably with oversight of the global economy by the International Monetary Fund.

But the BW discipline was effectively scrapped in the early 1970's. The International Criminal Court seems to be a token effort to do something, however little.