The so-called international criminal court

Well meaning idiotarians can rally round a court whose primary purpose would be to hobble American power. Having lost economically, militarily and culturally all that is left to the self-hating nihilists of the world is to fool the cool kids into limiting themselves. President Bush's decision to withdraw from participation in the court was one of the best of his administration.

The Toronto Red Star ran this article the other day regarding the Bush administration's decision to cut military aid to thirty-five countries who would hand Americans over to United Nations courts. Anyone who imagines this is an over-reaction should consider a kangaroo court established by Japanese lawyers "indicting" U.S. President George W. Bush for war crimes.

This is all idiotarian fun and games until somebody tries to put a member of the United States armed forces in the dock to face European notions of justice. Some cry for "international law" and for the United States to participate in a community of nations. Here is a simple point those people choose to misunderstand: there is no community of nations. The United States is a community subject to the express will of its millions of free citizens through a variety of democratic processes. No such will can be expressed by the millions held in bondage by the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Cuba and elsewhere. The evil men who rule over those people kept in bondage cannot be allowed a say in the fate of any American citizen, let alone a member of the United States military charged with the defense of hard-won liberty. It is shameful so many Europeans have been so ready to give up their own precarious freedom to the dictators of the world. It is a tragedy they should choose to turn over the very men and women who protect them as a grotesque latter-day danegeld.

A drum-head arrangement to suit the despots and their Eurocrat allies is a dangerous farce. Free peoples of the world congregate in the United States. Millions of Vietnamese-Americans, Cuban-Americans and Arab-Americans - a few examples among many - can and do express their will through the democratic process. If any courts may be considered to be truly international and truly able to act in the interest of those who remain enslaved they are courts of the United States.

And then... Mike Campbell has a follow-up at the Campblog, wondering about the ostensible deterrent value of the court to would-be despots. Take Hitler, for example:

"My military and state apparatus will withstand the military and economic might of the United States, Great Britain and the Commonwealth, Russia and all the old European states that lie in the path of the destiny of the Third Reich, but, wait .... once I'm dictator over much of the world, I may be tried in the International Criminal Court!! Perhaps I should reconsider my evil plans. Oh wait, I'm already occupying Belgium -- there is no more International Criminal Court. Phew."

Posted by the Flea at July 5, 2003 03:30 PM