War Crimes and Punishment

If Nicholas Kristof were my son, I would be beaming with pride and doubling his allowance after reading today's column. By now pretty much everyone is painfully aware of how the Bush administration disdains the UN and any other international organization. Kristof, however, does a brilliant job of pointing out the one organization that sends Bush and his cohorts into absolute spasms of terror - the International Court.

Two weeks ago, President Bush gave an impassioned speech to the world about the need to stand for human freedom.

But this week, administration officials are skulking in the corridors of the United Nations, trying desperately to block a prosecution of Sudanese officials for crimes against humanity.

Mr. Bush's sympathy for Sudanese parents who are having their children tossed into bonfires shrivels next to his hostility to the organization that the U.N. wants to trust with the prosecution: the International Criminal Court. Administration officials so despise the court that they have become, in effect, the best hope of Sudanese officials seeking to avoid accountability for what Mr. Bush himself has called genocide.

Why do Bush and Cheney quiver in fear at the mere mention of this tribunal? I have no doubt that you've already guessed, and I could just tell you myself. But that might be taken as alarmist rhetoric by some, so I'll just let Kristof go on to explain it himself.

Mr. Bush's worry is that if the International Criminal Court is legitimized, American officials could someday be dragged before it. The court's supporters counter that safeguards make that impossible. Reasonable people can differ about the court, but for Mr. Bush to put his ideological opposition to it over the welfare of the 10,000 people still dying every month in Darfur - that's just madness.

And some people complained when, before the election, I was putting up posters saying "Elect a madman, you get madness." So great is Bush's fear of giving any sort of credibility to the world's court that he is willing to leave the Darfur genocide rolling along rather than acknowledging their existence.

And well he should. The case for a charge of war crimes against Bush is fairly persuasive. He couldn't very well allow them to punish the authors of the Sudan atrocities and then just ignore them when a summons was sent to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Aggressively invading another country on false pretenses and against the wishes of the UN Security Council sounds, at least in my ears, like something that could result in about fifty thousand murder charges being dumped on your head.

Not that it will ever happen, of course - but it's nice to dream.