displace its administration in order to stop or prevent gross violations of human rights, ethnic cleansings, genocide, state terrorism, the operations of “death squads,” or large-scale military reprisals against civilians. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, cochaired by a former foreign minister of Australia, refers to such actions as “the responsibility to protect” and offers detailed conditions that, in its view, must be met for such intrusions ever to be justified.13 These include that serious and irreparable harm to human beings is actually occurring or is imminent, that the use of military force is a last resort, that the military force employed is appropriate in scale, and that there are reasonable prospects for success.
Since the early 1990s, the United States has claimed such humanitarian motivations in a series of armed intrusions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Humanitarian intervention was not originally raised as a factor in our invasion of Afghanistan. After we got there, however, the Bush administration claimed that one of our concerns was the harsh treatment of Afghan women under Taliban rule. This was not an issue, however, that had interested American leaders during the 1980s when they lavishly armed and supported the forces that became the Taliban. During those years, the United States and many of its allies failed to recognize their “responsibilities” to Rwandans, Chiapans, Chechens, Tibetans, Kashmiris, East Timorese, and Palestinians.
No one denies that, in extreme cases, foreign intervention to save innocent lives may be required. The issue is who gets to declare that a military intervention is humanitarian. The International Commission thinks that only the United Nations Security Council should authorize and legalize such activities, whatever the rationale; a self- declaration of humanitarian intervention like that of the United States in Somalia or Serbia thus becomes an act of imperialism. Positing a new, unilateral “responsibility to protect” that is to be the sole responsibility of the world’s last great power and then assuming it only when that superpower finds it convenient to do so may actually worsen relations among nations.
Since the September 11, 2001, attacks, our government no longer appears to want Security Council authorization for its foreign wars (if it ever did) and does not seem to think it needs it. President Bush’s speech at the United Nations on September 12, 2002, was more ultimatum than request: if the United Nations was not going to act against Iraq, then the United States would do so alone. On March 19, 2003, facing an almost certain veto and probably an outright majoritarian defeat if he had sought Security Council authorization for a war with Iraq, Bush made good on that threat and launched the war himself. Imperialism means, among other things, unilateralism in the decision making and actions of a nation, regardless of any humanitarian or other motives it may put forward. “The Rule of Power or the Rule of Law,” a major study by two nonprofit research organizations, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, analyzed the U.S. response to eight major international agreements, including the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. “The United States has violated, compromised, or acted to undermine in some crucial way every treaty that we have studied in detail,” says Nicole Deller, coauthor of the report.14 The United States “not only refuses to participate in newly created legal mechanisms, it fails to live up to obligations undertaken in treaties that it has ratified.”
According to the report, the United States is “drifting away from regarding treaties as an essential element in global security to a more opportunistic stand of abiding by treaties only when it is convenient.” Its attempt to undermine the International Criminal Court (ICC), the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal, is a vivid example of its unilateralist motives. On December 31, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the treaty that created the court, originally drafted during multilateral talks in Rome in July 1998 and subsequently signed and ratified by all of America’s closest democratic allies. But the administration of the younger George Bush, fearing that someday American high officials might find themselves called before the court (though “safeguards” in the treaty make this an unlikely prospect), not only refused to submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification but, in an unprecedented move, retroactively “unsigned” it. As journalist David Moberg has written, “U.S. rejection of the court is thus mainly a symbolic statement that America is not accountable to anyone .... Bush wants the United States to serve as the world’s investigator, policeman, prosecutor, judge, and executioner. This is an imperial ideal, not an assertion of sovereignty.”15 The administration simultaneously claimed itself no longer bound by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which requires signatory nations to refrain from taking steps to undermine treaties they sign, even if they do not ratify them. As with the treaty for the ICC, the United States had signed but not ratified the Vienna agreement.
Our government became so paranoid on the subject of the ICC that it attempted to bar former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke from even testifying in the war crimes trial of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic before the special U.N. tribunal on war crimes in the Hague. The State Department claimed it feared setting a precedent for cooperation with an international criminal court with jurisdiction over individuals, given that the ICC treaty had been successfully ratified by a sufficient number of nations and had come into being despite American opposition.16
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
