Since the inception of the International Criminal Court as a judicial body, the United States has constantly tried to wriggle out of its grasp. On Sept. 30 in Brussels, the 15 countries of the European Union voted to never extradite American soldiers or officials to the ICC, essentially slapping the entire notion of international law upside da' head.
The Bush regime likes to bludgeon our common sense with the tired argument that Americans could be unfairly targeted for extradition to the ICC in "politically motivated trials." Perhaps Bush has grown so accustomed to detaining suspiciously swarthy foreigners without a trial that he's forgotten what a trial actually entails.
A trial, in the ideal sense, is a forum where all the evidence is brought to bear on a specific matter, and after the evidence is judged, a ruling is meted out. So, in the most equal of all worlds, a country that extradited some Americans for "politically motivated" reasons would have to provide enough evidence to convince the ICC that an American had done something worthy of punishment.
That's the ideal case. In the real world, the United Nations, ICC and most other international bodies are controlled, regulated and funded by Western democracies, including the United States. So let's say that Libya decides to extradite some Marines. Libya would have to present to the ICC enough evidence to not only convince an impartial jury, but also to convince a jury likely functioning with a significant pro-West bias.
The EU deal, of course, had a catch: In exchange for immunity from the ICC, the United States promised to try any citizens that the EU would have extradited in an American court. Even if we assume that an American trial would be every bit as fair and rigorous as an ICC trial, this deal renders the EU toothless.
Picture the prime minister of a country like Belgium telephoning Bush and saying, "I would have tried that guy in the ICC, but since I signed this deal with you… would you mind extraditing him back to the States?"
A few war criminals will probably slip through the cracks. Take the extradition of Pinochet back to Chile, who would later avoid any substantive punishment. In fact, the only reason to even have the ICC is to avoid having to try war criminals in either their home countries or in the countries they victimized.
Noam Chomsky, a prominent dissident political critic, asserts that in order to evaluate the ethical ramifications of an action we have to "adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us."
According to this principle, the United States couldn't launch a pre-emptive strike on Iraq unless it was willing to sustain a pre-emptive strike in Washington from any country that sincerely claimed it felt threatened by the United States.
The U.S. media and government have a term for those countries that defy universality: rogue nations. By threatening to pull its peacekeepers if the world doesn't give them immunity from a court that it doesn't like (the United States, Israel and several authoritarian Arab countries are among the few that didn't ratify the ICC's founding treaty), the United States flouts any attempt at international democracy.
Does the United States simply lack the courage to defend its actions abroad against wayward and devious political attacks, or do they realize that many of its international military actions have nothing to do with the promotion of democracy and everything to do with cash and slaughter?
Solomon Rotstein is a humanities sophomore. Reach him at solomon.rotstein@asu.edu.
