FW: [paaffiliates] US Opposes ICC Bid To Make 'Aggression' A Crime Under International Law - Christian Science Monitor June 15, 2010
John D. Bostrom
Agression has been chief among those purposes ever since the last defeated ship set sail back to Britannia and the exceptional new kings of the New World began to unleash their brand-new, freedom-loving idealism on their less-fortunate neighbors. It's now long past the point where anyone can do anything about it. Evem if the Gulf oil spill were big enough to spread across the Atlantic and foul the beaches of Europe - so what? Even a huge Euro-Arab-Sino-African-Latin waging WWIII to "save the planet from the U.S." would never get off the ground. The Pentagon would just unleash a well-targeted nuke or two on the chief "architects of terror" and proclaim, "Who wants to be next?"
This is exactly why the Pentagon gets half the budget: to ensure that U.S.'s ever more merciful benevolence toward the rest of the world keeps rolling along without a hitch. The first priority is maintaining the iron fist. The velvet glove, though, is also very useful. The U.S. doesn't want to crush the ICC - just to ensure that it keeps its attention focused only on those designated as criminals by the U.S.
That's the reality, and there's a certain amount of relief to be had, Chomsky-style, in pointing out the truth behind the lies. But the exercise has been essentially reactive and negative, tending to the boring and depressing, and if you've managed to slog along this far with me, I have to ask: where can we possibly go from here in any positive direction? What does a discussion like this really do for us, or more tellingly, for anyone else in the world? Doesn't it just isolate us further behind an invisible barrier of "those in the know"? I got drawn into the discussion easily enough, because that's one of the main things we do in Peace Action, isn't it - discuss how bad things are? But at the end, my main thought is that I wish I hadn't, because really, how is it productive? I find myself wishing I'd spent the time reading more of Three Cups of Tea, or donating money to Greg Mortensen. It just seems more worthwhile.
Perhaps Mortensen's books best-sellers, while Chomsky's have a relatively limited audience, because most people are inspired by the possibility of doing something positive that will actually make a difference in the real world. And perhaps that may help explain why Peace Action's numbers have remained essentially stagnant for so many decades, despite having a cause that seems as if it should inspire every single person in the country to get involved. What are we really DOING?
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Martin
[mailto:kma...@peace-action.org]
Sent:
Wednesday, June 16, 2010 10:41 AM
To:
paaffi...@xmail.peace-action.org
Subject: [paaffiliates] US Opposes ICC
Bid To Make 'Aggression' A Crime Under International Law - Christian Science
Monitor June 15, 2010
Change we can believe in? Not so
much...
-----Original Message-----
From: Zia Mian [mailto:z...@Princeton.EDU]
Sent: Wed
6/16/2010 10:07 AM
To: pastr...@xmail.peace-action.org; Kevin Martin
Cc:
Lawrence Wittner
Subject: FW: US Opposes ICC Bid To Make 'Aggression' A
Crime Under International Law - Christian Science Monitor June 15,
2010
Need we say
more...
----------------------------------------
Christian Science
Monitor June 15, 2010
US Opposes ICC Bid To Make 'Aggression' A Crime
Under International Law
The Obama administration has resisted efforts by
the International Criminal Court to include 'aggression' as a crime, mainly
because it could impact US military operations abroad.
By Howard
LaFranchi, Staff writer
WASHINGTON - The United States under the Obama
administration has developed an increasingly close working relationship with the
International Criminal Court in The Hague. But that growing engagement with a
controversial institution of international law was unable to prevent the ICC
from expanding the scope of its work to include the murky crime of "aggression,"
a move the US had vehemently opposed.
At the 111-nation ICC's first
review conference that wrapped up last week in Kampala, Uganda, delegates
decided to expand the international court's purview to include the crime of
aggression - a crime that only the US has successfully tried, in the post-World
War II tribunals in Nuremburg and Tokyo.
State Department officials say
the US, which is not a signatory to the ICC, was able to mitigate the drawbacks
of such an expansion of the court's reach, primarily by putting off any
prosecution of the newest international crime until at least 2017.
But
some critics say the US failure to stop the enshrining of "aggression" as an
international crime demonstrates the limits of President Obama's multilateralist
vision - and sets the US on a collision course with the ICC when the issue comes
up again later in the decade.
"The fact remains that the Obama
administration's vaunted 'engagement' strategy was only able to check the ICC's
move towards defining 'aggression,' not stop it entirely," says Brett Schaefer,
an expert in international institutions at the Heritage Foundation in
Washington. "And it sets the US up for another battle in 2017 when the ICC's
advocates will make another push to activate the ICC's jurisdiction over
'aggression.'"
The US confirmed its new footing with the world's first
permanent court for trying war crimes and crimes against humanity, US officials
say, although they acknowledge that the US did not get everything it wanted in
Kampala. The Rome Statute establishing the ICC was finalized in 1998, but the
court did not begin to function until 2002, when the minimum 60 countries
ratified it.
US participation in the Kampala conference "reset US
relations with the court from hostility to positive engagement," says State
Department legal adviser Harold Koh. He says the US focus at the review
conference was on efforts to "strengthen justice on the ground" in countries so
that eventually their judicial systems will be strong enough to take on the
kinds of human-rights work the ICC addresses.
Mr. Koh says that focus was
particularly well-received in Africa, "where there is a strong desire to have
these cases tried at the national level."
Some ICC critics have also
noted that the court has only taken up two cases so far, both involving African
countries - one involving the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, and
the other regarding Sudan - and they dismiss the largely European-Union funded
court as a colonial institution pressing Western interests.
But the US
increasingly sees the value of the ICC, especially as it has tried cases that
begged for international intervention.
"If it weren't for the ICC [in
cases like Sudan or Uganda] you would have had to set up a special tribunal,"
says Stephen Rapp, the State Department's coordinator for war crimes
issues.
One of the main US concerns in seeing "aggression" added to the
ICC's jurisdiction was the impact it could potentially have on US military
operations abroad. But Koh says the US successfully negotiated the "aggression"
statute's wording so that US forces won't be susceptible to it.
"No US
national can be prosecuted for 'aggression' while the US is not a signatory" to
the ICC, he says.
--------------------------------------
Zia
Mian
Program on Science and Global Security
Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs Princeton University
221 Nassau Street, 2nd
floor
Princeton, NJ 08542
Tel: 609-258-5468
Fax:
609-258-3661
Email: z...@princeton.edu
Web:
www.princeton.edu/sgs
International Panel on Fissile Materials
Web:
www.fissilematerials.org
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