Bush's alternative rule set on the ICC
■"Bush's Aid Cuts On Court Issue Roil Neighbors," by Juan Forero, New York Times, 19 August 2005, p. A1.
The Bush White House cuts military aid to countries in the Gap and along the Seam if they don't sign special bilateral exclusionary treaties with the U.S. over the International Criminal Court. These are the infamous Article 98 agreements that we've got over 100 nations to sign (almost all are Gap). I call them "interventionary pre-nuptials," meaning the country in question promises in advance not to sue the U.S. in the ICC following any future military incursion on our part.
The Bush administration, just like the Clinton one before it, fears the ICC will be used to prosecute U.S. troops and government officials for alleged war crimes in connection to military interventions in the Gap, so we get countries there to promise to never invoke this alleged right.
Frankly, the fear is vastly overblown. The ICC was set up really to prosecute bad actors from Gap states alone, or from states lacking sufficiently robust legal rule sets to do such enforcement on their own. That's not America, and yet, when you see the Abu Ghraib and Gitmo debacles resulting in just a smattering of prosecutions yielding even fewer convictions, you just know we'd be facing such suits in the ICC from somebody.
Roughly 50 states in the world have told us to shove off with our exclusionary bilats, and the vast majority are Core states. The ones who have signed up are the Gap states that would rather face a sloppy U.S. military intervention than none at all at some point in the future when their country faces internal strife. Plus, the threat of losing U.S. aid is a big motivator.
A nasty bit of strong arming by the U.S.? Sure. But if the Core wants the U.S. to play occasion Leviathan and full-time SysAdmin in the Gap, we'll need some sort of blanket protection clause via-a-vis the ICC. It's as simple as that. Not something that's open-ended, as in, "Do what you want whenever your want and wherever you need to," but a standing agreement that says, "under these conditions, you're good to go."
Those conditions? That's the A-to-Z Core-wide rule set for processing politically bankrupt states in the Gap that's the centerpiece of Chapter 1 in Blueprint for Action.
You shrink the Gap and you replace bad states with good ones, and then the role of the ICC becomes moot in those successful cases of Gap-to-Core transition. But until that transition occurs, don't pretend you can hold the intervening troops to Core standards in lawless Gap situations.