When International Laws Attack

So: is Sonny right that it’s out of control and stupid for foreign countries to think about capturing and prosecuting Bush administration officials for war crimes (after January)? Maybe. Is he right that Americans would totally flip out if high-ranking Washington geeks who wanted to dip their toes in the Mediterranean found themselves locked in a modernist clink in the Low Countries? Yes. But would it be deemed an act of war? Doubtful. It would most likely be deemed yet another opportunity for President Obama to spread his message of hope and healing around the global village. Or, possibly, it would be deemed yet another instance of President McCain’s karmic blowback, a godawful headache that would go to show just how hamstrung and crippled a McCain foreign policy agenda would be. Unflattering comparisons would be developed between McCain’s time in the Hanoi Hilton and Yoo/Rumsfeld/Whoever’s time in the Hague Hilton.

Why am I not terribly worried about these nightmarish scenarios coming to pass? Because any American official called up on war crimes charges would ‘have to’ be found guilty, because if they were found innocent it would be the international criminal law version of the O.J. Simpson trial, and the legitimacy of international law is already under strain from at least four different quarters, and yet if American officials were found guilty of war crimes the necessary punishments would shock and outrage the European conscience, in addition to throwing average Americans into fits of pugnacious repugnance, and the cost of ‘securing justice’ would be so heavy as to bankrupt, probably forever, the entire fund of institutional authority available to international law, an outcome to be cherished and championed by despots, cranks, and scumbags from Harare to Vladivostok.

So let’s all take a deep breath. We’ll never have to live through that run-on sentence. We won’t even have to read it again.