Most of the mainly-ignored brouhaha concerning PNAC has centered on the following excerpt from PNAC's Sept 2000 report,
Further, the process of transformation [of the U.S. military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.
Okay, so what's this diary actually about? In the second half of the Clinton admistration there was an attempt to work with the nascent International Criminal Court (ICC). (There's a big hole here in my memory; please fell free to flesh out the details.) Anyway, the whole idea of the ICC was entirely repugnant to the neocons, of course, but little could we know exactly why at the time.
January 2, 2001
MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS
FROM: GARY SCHMITT
SUBJECT: International Criminal Court
On the last day of 2000, President Clinton signed the International Criminal Court convention, a treaty which the president himself admits is flawed and which he has no intention of submitting to the Senate for its ratification. The president did so, he said, in order to put the U.S. in a position to help correct the treaty's imperfections. But the ICC accord is not just flawed -- it is fatally flawed -- and the best policy is for the U.S. to reject the treaty simply. Without America's participation, the ICC will die on the vine.
More than two years ago, at the conclusion of the conference in Rome which finalized the treaty's terms, we voiced our concern that the Clinton Administration would continue to try and fix the un-fixable. As we argued then, whatever the respectable motives behind the creation of the International Criminal Court, we should not let those blind us to the fact that the preservation of a decent world order depends chiefly on the exercise of American leadership. For both geo-political and constitutional reasons, we should not be in the business of delegating that leadership or compounding the difficulties of its exercise by creating unaccountable, supra-national bodies.
We also circulated at the time a statement on the ICC made by John Bolton, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute and a Project director, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (July 23, 1998). No major, substantive change has been made to the treaty's terms since. Bolton's statement still stands as a thorough and devastating critique of the proposed court. An edited version of that statement follows.
Summary of Statement Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
John R. Bolton
Delegates to the recently concluded conference in Rome have created not only a court with sweeping and poorly defined jurisdiction, but also a powerful and unaccountable prosecutor. International support for the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the independent prosecutor is based on emotional appeals to an abstract ideal of an international judicial system which frequently run contrary to sound principles of international crisis resolution and is at odds with the American standards of constitutional order. For some, faith in the ICC is motivated largely by an unstated agenda of creating ever-more-comprehensive international organizations to bind nation states in general, and this nation in particular. Regrettably, the Administration's own naive support for the concept of an ICC has now left the United States in a far weaker position internationally than if we had simply declared our principled opposition to the concept in the first place.
The Nuremberg Analogy
A substantial part of the emotional appeal of an ICC is the mistaken notion that it traces its intellectual lineage directly back to the Nuremberg (and Tokyo) war crimes trials after World War II. But the success achieved by Nuremberg must be understood in its context. First, the Nuremberg trials were conducted in the aftermath of a war that resulted in the complete military and political victory of the winners, and the unconditional surrender of the losers. Second, the principal managers of Nuremberg, the British and the Americans, shared political and juridical norms. And, third, the Allies had a vision of what the post-Occupation governments of the defeated states would be, and the trials were just one element, albeit an important one, in the necessary transformation to a new society. Restating this history, even in summary fashion, demonstrates the unique circumstances that permitted the successful prosecution of war crimes at Nuremberg; it also explains why the ICC is almost certain to fail.
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The ICC and the UN Security Council
With virtually no debate in Rome, the ICC has been created as an organization outside of the United Nations system. In so doing, the Rome Conference has substantially minimized, if not effectively eliminated, the Security Council (and the veto power of the U.S. as one of the Council's five Permanent Members) from any role in its affairs. Since the Council is charged by Article 24 of the UN Charter with "primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security," it is incongruous that the Council and the ICC are to operate virtually independent of one another. The Council, as a result, now risks having the ICC interfering in its ongoing work and further confusing the appropriate roles of law, politics and power in settling international disputes.
The Question of Jurisdiction
A key problem for Americans is that there is insufficient clarity or agreement over the substantive jurisdiction of the ICC and the Prosecutor. This is not a court of limited jurisdiction. Even for genocide, the oldest codified among the three crimes specified in the Statute of Rome, there is not complete clarity in what it means. For the other two broadly defined crimes (war crimes and crimes against humanity), the vagueness is even greater, as is the accompanying risk that an activist Court and Prosecutor can broaden the Statute's language in an essentially unchallengeable fashion.
Much of the media attention to the American negotiating position on the ICC concentrated on the risks perceived by the Pentagon to American peacekeepers stationed around the world. As real as those risks may be, especially under the concept of "universal jurisdiction," our real concern should be for the President and his top advisers. The definition of "war crimes" includes, for example: "intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities." A fair reading of this provision leaves one unable to answer with confidence the question whether the United States was guilty of war crimes for its aerial bombing campaigns over Germany and Japan in World War II. A fortiori, these provisions seem to imply that the U.S. would have been guilty of a war crime for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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Now, keep in mind that, while Bolton's testimony before the FRC was on July 23, 1998, this memo is dated Jan 2, 2001, after it was known that the next president would be George W. Bush. This is murky as hell, naturally, but could Bolton have been running early interference for the next president and the PNAC-promoted Iraq invasion to come? It sure as hell had little to do with concern for Clinton.
Could it be that Bolton's "concern" for possible criminal complicity/duplicity of the U.S. President has anything to do with his promotion to U.N. Ambassador?
The Clinton administration was just a period of temporary exile for the neocons, so why not?
