John Bolton’s political body lies a moulderin’ in his grave, and Condoleezza Rice’s State Department is jumping all over it. And now the administration is backtracking on Bolton’s self-proclaimed proudest achievement — the “unsigning” of the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court. John Bellinger, State Department legal adviser told scholars at DePaul University: “We do not disagree over the statute’s end goals, and we are prepared to work with those who support the court in appropriate circumstances.” If not exactly a ringing endorsement, it signals an end to the war of attrition waged by Bolton, the former unconfirmed US ambassador to the UN, and his ilk.
These palaeocons viewed the court as a direct threat to American sovereignty, and they used the Bush administration to fight it in every way. One was to refuse military cooperation to any country that ratified the treaty and refused to sign a bilateral agreement with Washington that uniquely protected Americans from being extradited.
The treaty itself, at least before Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, had so many defenses built in against “politically motivated” prosecutions that Bolton and company feared that foreign observers could never really see what the problem was. Never mind that this was like developing air-fresheners for astronauts in case the moon was made of green cheese. The administration harassed small countries to sign bilateral agreements. Underlining the element of bullying already inherent in trying to exclude Americans uniquely from the court’s jurisdiction, Washington did not apply the rules to its major allies, all of whom were among the 106 ratifiers of the treaty.
In fact, many of the so-called bilateral agreements extorted from small countries were as substantial as the “coalition of the coerced” that Bush pulled together for the invasion of Iraq, not ratified by Parliaments, and in any case, according to many legal experts, illegal.
And, of course, since Bolton’s departure and his scathing comments on the State Department and Bush policies, there must also be some retributive factor: Dancing on Bolton’s political grave by downplaying the deed of which he was most proud, “unsigning” the treaty that Clinton, along with Israel and Iran, had signed in the last weeks of his second term. But even then, all the main candidates left in the field are somewhat, well, Clintonian, on the issue. They all talk about cooperation with the ICC, and are prepared to entertain signing with proper safeguards.
It is a sad commentary on what this administration has done to the US’ standing that when the treaty was under negotiation the other parties were quite prepared to accept that the US military justice system was exemplary and that war crimes committed by its troops would be prosecuted domestically. After waterboarding, rendition, illegal military commissions and sentences for Abu Ghraib more commensurate with a ticket for jaywalking than wholesale violations of the Geneva Conventions, US delegates will not be addressing their colleagues from any moral high ground.
Any new president who really wanted to draw a line under the US’ shameful scofflawishness under the Bush administration should really ratify the ICC treaty immediately without reservations
