How Does That Look?
On a less frivolous note. There is this little matter of the Bush administration’s repeated, insistent attacks on the International Criminal Court, which I find massively depressing and disgusting. The Clinton administration wasn’t a great deal better, but I’m not sure they would have acted quite so aggressively as the Bush team, for instance actually bullying countries that don’t exempt the US from the Court’s jurisdiction. And I’m not sure they would have threatened to veto a UN resolution to protect humanitarian workers simply because it had the unmitigated temerity to mention the Court.
Yes I know the rationale: they’re afraid such a court would bring ‘frivolous’ prosecutions against US soldiers. Yes, but what if US soldiers do commit war crimes? What if there is another My Lai, for example? And then there’s the way the whole idea of international law is undermined if the most powerful country on the planet refuses to be subject to it. If we won’t, why should anyone else? And how do we think it makes us look to all those others? Like people who are planning to commit war crimes and want immunity in advance, is what it makes us look like. Appearances do matter.
I think the US record, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, make it very clear that a deliberate disdain of International Law is part of current US foreign policy.
And I wish that were not the case. I wish we could manage to do both – to prevent war crimes by Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein without demanding immunity for ourselves and especially without bullying the people who support the Court.
The construction of your sentence “I wish we could…” seems to imply that well, we can’t- i.e. it is not possible to prevent Al Qaeda and Saddam from committing war crimes without committing a few ourselves.
Or am I being rabidly paranoid on this issue?
Well, Evie, the subjunctive mood is a tricky thing, especially in English, where it often takes the same form as the conditional. I didn’t mean to imply that we can’t, merely to regret that we’re not doing it now. But no, you’re not being rabidly paranoid for thinking so. Fortunately there are more than two possibilities, and here I think we can just blame the built-in ambiguities of English.