Chalmers Johnson - Blowback, Second Edition - The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

The terms of the treaty setting up the court specifically include as war crimes rape, forced pregnancy, torture, and the forcible recruitment of children into the military. The United States objected to including these acts within the court’s jurisdiction, claiming that the court should concern, itself only with genocide. The French at first joined the United States in opposing the treaty because French troops had trained the Hutu-controlled Rwandan military, which in 1993 and 1994 helped organize the massacres of some eight hundred thousand people belonging to the Tutsi tribe. France feared that its officers and men could be charged with complicity in genocide. After a clause was added to the treaty allowing signatories to exempt themselves from the court’s jurisdiction for its first seven years, France said that its fears had been assuaged and agreed to sign.

This escape clause was still not enough for the United States. Its representative held that because the “world’s greatest military and economic power . . . is expected” to intervene in humanitarian catastrophes wherever they occur, this “unique position” makes its personnel especially vulnerable to the mandate of an international criminal court capable of arresting and trying individuals. He did not deal with the question of whether war crimes charges against Americans might on some occasions be warranted, nor did he, of course, raise the possibility that if his country intervened less often in the affairs of other states where none of its vital interests were involved, it might avoid the possibility of even a capricious indictment.

Secretary of Defense William Cohen attempted to intimidate delegates to the conference by threatening to withdraw American forces from the territories of those allies that did not support the United States’ proposal for limiting the international criminal court’s jurisdiction. In Washington, Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at hearings on the new international criminal court treaty urged the president and Congress to announce that it would indeed make good on Cohen’s threat—a suggestion that led some Japanese, among others, to speculate that ratifying the treaty might finally be a way to get the Americans out of their countries.

In his book Death by Government , the historian Rudolph Rummel estimates that during the twentieth century, 170 million civilians have been victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. 1As Michael Scharf of the American Society of International Law notes, the pledge of “never again” by the two war crimes tribunals that the Allies set up in Nuremberg and Tokyo in the wake of World War II has in the intervening years become “again and again.” 2

At Nuremberg, the United States pioneered the idea of holding governmental leaders responsible for war crimes, and it is one of the few countries that has an assistant secretary of state for human rights. Its pundits and lawmakers endlessly criticize other nations for failing to meet American standards in the treatment of human beings under their jurisdiction. No country has been more active than the United States in publicizing the idea of “human rights,” even if it has been notably silent in some cases, ignoring, implicitly condoning, or even endorsing acts of state terrorism by regimes with which it has been closely associated. (Examples would include the repression of the Kwangju rebels in South Korea in 1980; all of the right-wing death squads in Central America during the 1980s; the Shah’s repression of dissidents in Iran when he was allied with the United States; the United States’ support in bringing General Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile and its subsequent willingness to exonerate him from responsibility for the torture and killing of at least four thousand of his own citizens; and Turkey’s genocide against its Kurdish population.) The American government displays one face to its own people (and its English-speaking allies) but another in areas where the support of repressive governments seems necessary to maintain American imperial dominance. Whenever this contradiction is revealed, as at Rome, Americans try to cover it up with rhetoric about the national burden of being the “indispensable nation,” or what the Council on Foreign Relations calls the world’s “reluctant sheriff.”

Only seven months before the Rome vote, there was another moment when the nature of America’s stealth imperialism was revealed. In December 1997, in Ottawa, 123 nations pledged to ban the use, production, or shipment of antipersonnel land mines. Retired American military leaders like General Norman Schwarzkopf, commanding general of allied forces in the Gulf War, have endorsed the ban, arguing that these primitive but lethal weapons have no role in modern warfare. The Clinton administration, however, bowed to military vested interests desperate to retain land mines in the American arsenal. Among other things, it insisted that land mines were needed to protect South Korea against the “North’s overwhelming military advantage,” itself a myth. The holdouts against this agreement were Afghanistan, China, Russia (which later reversed its position), Vietnam—and the United States. An American citizen, Jody Williams of Putney, Vermont, would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in organizing nations and various lobbying groups like the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation to work toward ending the use of this “garbage weapon”—a phrase from Robert Muller, another American and a Vietnam veteran wounded by a land mine, who set in motion the movement that resulted in the treaty. 3The Clinton administration felt so embarrassed by its vote that in May 1998 it convened its own Conference on Global Humanitarian Demining at the State Department in a public relations attempt to improve its image. Only twenty-one countries attended.

There are today between sixty million and one hundred million deployed land mines in some sixty countries around the world (at least ten million in Cambodia alone and another nine million in Angola). They cost on average about three dollars apiece to produce. They kill some twenty-six thousand people a year, primarily civilians in developing countries, and they have been responsible for the deaths of more people than all the weapons of mass destruction combined.

Although the U.S. military claims that it has accounted for all the mines it has laid in Korea and that they cause no civilian casualties, this is simply untrue. There are, for example, still some twenty thousand to thirty thousand M14 antipersonnel mines in the ground in the Chungri mountain area of Yong-do, just off the seaport of Pusan in the extreme south of Korea. The U.S. forces laid the mines in 1956 to protect a missile unit it based there, and they were never removed when the unit was relocated. They have been blamed for many civilian injuries and deaths since the 1960s. 4

The Australian government, which strongly backed the Ottawa treaty, estimates that it would take 1,100 years to clear the world’s mines using current techniques, which depend on metal detection. Modern land mines actually contain little metal, and Australia is sponsoring research to locate buried mines through their “thermal footprints”—that is, by identifying irregularities in ground-surface temperatures created by the different properties of mines and the earth around them. It plans to incorporate this technology into unmanned aerial vehicles whose task will be to detect mines from the air and so lessen current risks to ground personnel in mine-clearing operations. 5One might well ask why the Pentagon, with its $267.2 billion budget for the year 2000, has not provided serious funding for similar research.

Former marine Bobby Muller, who in 1969 was blown off a road in Vietnam by a mine and later crippled by gunfire, says that President Clinton told him he simply could not “risk a breach with the Pentagon establishment by daring to sign the treaty.” Jody Williams put it more bluntly, saying that Clinton “did not have the courage to be the commander-in-chief of his military.” 6, But these comments may miss the point. It is not just a matter of personal courage. The relationship between the civilian elite that runs this country and its powerful military has undergone a sea change since the 1950s. It is now increasingly likely that a congressman, a senator, a state department official, even a president will not have served in the military. The draft-deferment system during the Vietnam War signaled the early stages of this process, in which promising students and professionals—mainly middle- or upperclass young men—were kept out of Vietnam in the name of national security and the nation’s welfare, while the poor and working-class largely fought the war. Both President Clinton and his secretary of defense William Cohen enjoyed student deferments during Vietnam (Cohen had a marital one as well), and neither served in the armed forces. In the wake of Vietnam, with the military transformed into a purely volunteer career choice, the gap between the experiences of the civilian and the military hierarchies has only widened—and with the threat of the former USSR ended, the fact is that the military has for the first time begun to slip beyond civilian control.