Even Orwell would be at a loss to make sense of some of the recent \nantics of leading governments. We would expect Orwell to be \nout-satirized by the U.S. actions to impose penalties and sanctions on \nofficials of the International Criminal Court not because they are \naccused of acting improperly or seem guilty of some kind of corruption \nbut because they were doing their appointed jobs carefully, yet \nfearlessly. Their supposed wrongdoing was to accept the request an \ninvestigation into allegations of war crimes committed in Afghanistan by\n military personnel and intelligence experts of the U.S. armed forces, \nthe Taliban, and the Afghan military. It seemed beyond reasonable doubt \nthat a string of war crimes and crimes against humanity had occurred in \nAfghanistan ever since the U.S.-led regime-changing attack in 2002, \nfollowed by many years of occupation and continuous combat amid a \nhostile population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It should be noted that Israel is equally infuriated with that the ICC should have affirmed the authority its Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, to investigate allegations by Palestine of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. These allegations include the unlawful transfer of Israeli civilians to establish settlements as well as administrative structures that constitute violations of the criminal prohibition on apartheid. Netanyahu, like his Washington sibling, has called for the ICC to be subject to sanctions for staging this \u2018full frontal attack\u2019 on Israeli democracy and somehow on \u2018the Jewish people\u2019s right to live in Israel.\u2019 The Israeli Prime Minister contends that Israel as a sovereign state has the right to defend itself as it wishes, and should not be impeded by any obligation to respect international criminal law. Such a claim, and the abusive practices and policies that have followed over many years, amounts to a disturbing affirmation of what I have elsewhere called \u2018gangster geopolitics.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The angry U.S. pushback did not bother contesting the substantive \nallegations, but questioned the jurisdictional authority of the ICC, and\n attacked the audacity of this international entity for supposing that \nit could investigate, much less prosecute and punish the representatives\n of such a mighty state that should in no way be held internationally \naccountable. When the ICC was investigating, and indicting, only African\n leaders few Western eyebrows were raised, but recently when the Court \nfinally dared to treat equals equally in accord with its own legal \nframework\u2014the Rome Statute of 2000\u2014it had in Washington\u2019s and Tel Aviv\u2019s\n eyes so overstepped its unspoken limits as to itself become a \nwrongdoer, and by this outlandish logic, making the institution and its \nofficials legitimate targets for sanctions. What this kind of \nunprecedented pushback amounts to is a notable rejection of the global \nrule of law when it comes to international crime and a crude effort to \nremind international institutions that \u2018impunity\u2019 and \u2018double standards\u2019\n remain an operational principal norm of world order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking for the U.S. Government the response of the Secretary of \nState, Mike Pompeo, stunningly exhibited the hubris that became the U.S.\n global brand well before Donald Trump disgraced the country and harmed \nthe peoples of the world during his tenure as president. Pompeo\u2019s \nreaction to the unanimous approval of the Prosecutor\u2019s request to \ninvestigate war crimes in Afghanistan was little other than seizing the \noccasion to insult the ICC by describing it as \u201clittle more than a \npolitical tool employed by unaccountable international elites.\u201d Such a \nstatement crosses the borders of absurdity given the abundant \ndocumentation of numerous U.S. crimes in Afghanistan (the subject-matter\n of Chelsea Manning\u2019s WikiLeaks 2010 disclosures that landed her in \njail) and in several \u2018black sites\u2019 in European countries where foreign \nsuspects are routinely tortured, and subject to rape. Contra Pompeo, it \nis not the \u2018international elites\u2019 that are unaccountable but the \nnational elites running the U.S. and Israeli governments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Pompeo dismissal was a prelude to the issuance by Trump on 11 June of an Executive Order that extended the prior denial of a U.S. visa to Bensouda, and threatened a variety of sanctioning moves directed at anyone connected with the ICC and its undertaking, including freezing assets and withholding visas, not only of individuals, but also of their families, on the laughable pretext that the prospective ICC investigation was creating a \u2018national emergency\u2019 in the form of an \u201cunusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.\u201d Even before the present crisis, Trump had told the UN in a 2018 speech at the General Assembly that<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201c\u2026 the ICC has no jurisdiction, no legitimacy, and no authority\u2026 We \nwill never surrender America\u2019s sovereignty to an unelected, \nunaccountable, global bureaucracy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As crude as are the words and deeds of the Trump crowd, there were \nalmost equally defiant precursors, especially during the presidency of \nGeorge W. Bush, an anti-ICC campaign led by none other than John Bolton \nwho was to become Trump\u2019s notorious National Security Advisor, and is \ncurrently his antagonist due to his book publicizing Trump\u2019s array of \nimpeachable offenses. Remember that it was Bush who \u2018un-signed\u2019 the Rome\n Statute that Bill Clinton had signed on behalf of the U.S. on the last \nday of his presidency, but with the proviso that the treaty should not \nbe submitted to the Senate for ratification and hence not be applicable,\n until the ICC had proved itself a responsible actor to Washington\u2019s \nsatisfaction. Congress stepped in to make sure that U.S. military \npersonnel would not be charged with international crimes both by \nthreatening preventive action and entering into over 100 agreements with\n other countries to ensure immunity from ICC jurisdiction, coupled with a\n threat to withhold aid if a government refused to so agree. Hillary \nClinton also observed some years that since the U.S. was more globally \npresent than other countries, it was important to be sure that its \nmilitary personnel would not be brought before the ICC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In other words, non-accountability and double standards have deeper \nroots than the extreme anti-internationalism of Trump. It can be \nusefully traced back to the \u2018victors\u2019 justice\u2019 approach to war crimes \nduring the second world war where only the crimes of the defeated were \nsubjected to accountability at Nuremberg and Tokyo, a step hailed as a \ngreat advance despite its flaws. It was deeply flawed considering that \narguably the most horrifying act during the four years of hostilities \nwere the atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities. Is there any doubt \nthat if Germany or Japan had beaten the Allies to the bomb, and used it \nagainst cities in the UK or the U.S., and yet lost the war, those \nresponsible for the decisions would have been held accountable, and \npunished in a harsh manner?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In some ways as bad from a law angle was the U.S. orchestrated trial \nof Saddam Hussein and his closest advisors for their state crimes, \nalthough the 2003 war arose from acts of aggression by the United States\n and UK, and subsequent crimes during a prolonged occupation of Iraq. In\n other words, the idea of unconditional impunity for the crimes of the \nUnited States is complemented by self-righteous accountability for those\n leaders of countries defeated in war by the United States. Such \n\u2018exceptionalism\u2019 should shock the conscience of anyone with a sense of \nthe ideas of fairness and equality that should be core values in the \napplication of international criminal law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As might be expected, mainstream NGOs and liberal Democrats are not \nhappy with such an insulting and gratuitous slap in the face of \ninternational institutions that have proved mainly useful in going after\n the wrongdoing of non-Western leaders, especially in Africa. It should \nbe remembered that African countries and their leaders were the almost \nexclusive targets of ICC initiatives during its first ten years, and it \nwas from Africa that one formerly heard complaints and threats of \nwithdrawal from the treaty, but I doubt that ideas of sanctioning the \nICC ever entered the imaginary of understandable African displeasure at \nan implicit ethos of \u2018white crimes don\u2019t matter\u2019!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
David Sheffer, the diplomat who headed the U.S. delegation that \nnegotiated the Rome Statute on behalf of the Clinton presidency, but who\n was careful to preserve Anglo American geopolitical interests, \nexpressed the liberal opposition to Trump\u2019s arrogant style of pushback \nwith these words:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe [Trump] Executive Order will go down in history as a shameful act of fear and retreat from the rule of law.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is an element of hypocrisy present in such a denunciation due to withholding the pre-Trump record of one-sided imposition of international criminal law. \u00a0True enough, it was the prior Republican president that had locked horns with the ICC some years ago, but the ambivalence of Congress and the Clintons is part of a consistent U.S. insistence of what I would label as \u2018negative exceptionalism,\u2019 that is, the right to act internationally without accountability while taking a hard line on holding others accountable; impunity for the powerful, accountability for the weak. It used to be that Anglo American exceptionalism was associated with a commitment to decency, human rights, and the rule of law that was missing elsewhere, and could serve as a catalyst for peace and justice in the world. Such self-glorification has long since been forfeited as at the altar of global geopolitics, which makes up the rules as it goes along, while showing contempt for the legal constraints that are deemed suitable for the regulation of adversaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agencies <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Even Orwell would be at a loss to make sense of some of the recent antics of leading governments. We would expect Orwell to be out-satirized by the U.S. actions to impose penalties and sanctions on officials of the International Criminal Court not because they are accused of acting improperly or seem guilty of some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6252","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}