Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

On March 11, 2003, the ICC began formal operations in The Hague considering charges of war crimes committed after July 1, 2002. Anticipating that development, both houses of Congress passed the American Services Members’ Protection Act, which would, in effect, allow the United States to use military force to free any American citizen held by the court. Dutch politicians, longtime American allies, mystified and outraged by what they saw as senseless grandstanding, sardonically referred to the legislation as the “Hague Invasion Act.” 17

The Bush administration claims it fears “capricious” prosecutions of its officials and military officers by an international prosecutor over whom it has no control, even though the Treaty of Rome contains many safeguards against arbitrary prosecutions, including the right of any nation to precedence over the ICC in trying its own citizens for war crimes. If the United States resists the establishment of a court that can prosecute individuals for war crimes, it is precisely because its global imperialist activities almost inevitably involve the commission of such crimes. The United States is the sole country the old World Court (which can try only nations, not individuals) ever condemned for terrorism—owing to the Reagan administration’s covert action to destabilize and destroy the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in 1984.

The administration has always claimed that its opposition to the ICC is rooted in its desire to shield ordinary servicemen and low-ranking officers from war crimes charges, but its real concern clearly has been that the court might try to prosecute President Bush or other prominent civilian and military leaders. Remembering well the impact of Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigation of former President Bill Clinton for his sexual dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, the administration fears that were an international prosecutor to open a public investigation into the acts of President Bush, it might have a deleterious political impact, even if it never led to an indictment. 18

These fears are, in some ways, not that far-fetched. After all, General Wesley Clark, commander of the NATO air war against Serbia, is as liable under the Geneva Convention of 1949 for not stopping the illegal bombing of water-treatment plants, hospitals, and schools, which killed almost 2,000 civilians, as Dragan Obrenovic, the Bosnian Serb general who commanded the assault on Srebrenica in July 1995 and subsequently was turned over to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague for trial. Prosecutors in Chile, Argentina, Spain, and France would like to put former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on trial for his support and sponsorship of the military dictatorships of Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Ecuador while, in the 1970s, they were killing, torturing, and “disappearing” their own citizens and those of neighboring lands. 19

Similarly, the newly independent nation of East Timor would like to ask Kissinger under oath what he meant when, the day before Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of the former Portuguese territory began, he seemed to give the green light to Indonesian strongman General Suharto. On December 6, 1975, on their way home from a visit to Beijing, President Gerald R. Ford and Kissinger stopped off in Jakarta for a meeting with Suharto. The general told them of his plans to seize the territory against the will of its inhabitants and incorporate it into Indonesia. Even though the Indonesian army was equipped in part with American weaponry, and the use of such arms for domestic purposes is illegal under U.S. law, Kissinger said, “It is important that whatever you do succeed quickly” and asked whether the Indonesians anticipated a “long guerrilla war.” General Ali Murtopo, one of the architects of the seizure, replied that “the whole business will be settled in three weeks.” 20The Indonesian army went on to kill some 200,000 East Timorese.

The administration has not only tried to undercut treaties it finds inconvenient but refused to engage in normal diplomacy with its allies to make such treaties more acceptable. Thus, administration representatives simply walked away from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming that tried to rein in carbon dioxide emissions, claiming that the economic costs were too high. (The United States generates far more such emissions than any other country.) All of the United States’s democratic allies continued to work on the treaty despite the boycott. On July 23, 2001, in Bonn, Germany, a compromise was reached on the severity of the cuts in emissions advanced industrial nations would have to make and on the penalties to be imposed if they do not, resulting in a legally binding treaty endorsed by more than 180 nations. The modified Kyoto Protocol is hardly perfect, but it is a start toward the reduction of greenhouse gases.

Similarly, the United States and Israel walked out of the United Nations conference on racism held in Durban, South Africa, in August and September 2001. The nations that stayed on eventually voted down Syrian demands that language accusing Israel of racism be included. In the conference’s final statement, they also produced an apology for slavery as a “crime against humanity” but did so without language that would have made slave-holding nations liable for reparations. Given the history of slavery in the United States and the degree to which the final document was adjusted to accommodate American concerns, the walkout seemed a display of imperial petulance—or yet another message that “we” do not need “you” to run this world.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many domestic and foreign observers expressed hopes that the United States would abandon its imperial unilateralism in recognition that its war against terrorism—or at least its efforts to control the financing of terrorism—required allies and a massive, coordinated international effort. 21But this hope proved illusory. In the months after 9/11, the Bush administration unilaterally denied rights normally accorded prisoners of war to the fighters it had seized in Afghanistan and was holding at “Camp X-Ray,” a complex of open-air wire cages on the old American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. 22It unilaterally declared Iran, Iraq, and North Korea to be “rogue states” that constituted an “axis of evil” and reserved the right preemptively to destroy any or all of them or, in fact, any other nation deemed potentially hostile that maintained or planned to acquire “weapons of mass destruction”—nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. At the same time, the United States endorsed the development of new and more “usable” nuclear weapons of its own and dramatically expanded the circumstances in which the Pentagon would consider “going nuclear” in a future conflict, all this in open violation of its pledge under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to make an “unequivocal undertaking” to eliminate its nuclear arsenal. 23The Bush administration has similarly exempted itself from a treaty prohibiting the manufacture of biological weapons because it might have to open “private” pharmaceutical plants to international inspectors.

From evidence of this sort, the late Flora Lewis, longtime New York Times analyst of international relations, concluded that “the U.S. is turning its back on any global rules.” She was concerned particularly by our attempt to subvert an international agreement to limit the world trade in small arms. In July 2001, John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, had declared that the United States intended to thwart any agreement that might constrict the right of its citizens to possess guns. 24Professor Michael Glennon, a specialist in international law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, concludes that the Bush administration’s unilateralism and its refusal to be bound by Security Council resolutions means that “the [U.N.] Charter provisions governing the use of force are simply no longer regarded as binding international law.... The Charter has, tragically, gone the way of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand pact which purported to outlaw war and was signed by every major belligerent in World War II.” 25