Freedom To Ethnically Cleanse

After fewer than 18 months in office, there can't be many things left that the Bush Administration could do to provoke incredulousness among the rest of the world's 190-plus countries. But every time our allies and detractors alike think our Simpleton-in-Chief, and the zealots he has surrounded himself with, cannot possibly sink any lower, they go and outdo themselves. And they've just gone and done it again.

The United States veto -- at the White House's command -- of authorization for a continuing United Nations peacekeeping force in Bosnia, because the U.S. objects to the jurisdiction of the newly formed (over U.S. objections) International Criminal Court, sends a clear and stunning message to the rest of the world. It is, not to be too blunt in this family-oriented feature, essentially a grand old "screw you" to the world community. The official (and more-graciously phrased) U.S. objection to the ICC is that we fear that for "politically motivated reasons" U.S. soldiers could be targeted by the ICC for prosecution on war crimes.

The Bushies argue that targeting U.S. soldiers would be inappropriate -- and they're right. The more serious war criminals aren't the guys and gals pushing buttons or firing rounds, but the guys and gals in power suits and medal-laden uniforms that give them the orders. Grunts aren't on trial in the Hague for war crimes -- Slobodan Milosevic is, and so are many of his top lieutenants. As was the case with that military dictatorship, it's the top people in our government and military who give the orders that regularly result, all over the world, in massive numbers of American-inflicted deaths among what we now euphemistically call "non-combatants." (In a past life, they were called women, children, and old people.)

As if to underscore the White House's concern, within literally hours of the U.N. vote, reports began emerging from Afghanistan that the Americans had once again bombed and killed more of those innocent non-combatants -- in this case, a rural wedding party at which over 100 people died. The reports have followed the usual pattern: outraged witnesses, villagers, and lower-level Afghan officials (the ones who didn't go to school with their new American bosses back in the Ivy League), followed by confirmation from the Pentagon that "a bomb went astray" and a pledge that "we're trying to find out who's responsible," claiming that the explosion might have been from unspecified anti-aircraft artillery fire. In the past, that's the part that makes headlines here: in about a week, the Pentagon may, in the face of incontrovertible proof, admit that we did it, but it will be buried on page 16 of your local paper (if that) under "In Other News."

Truth be told, there have been so many of these sorts of incidents since last October -- before and after the fall of the Taliban -- that a single one really isn't newsworthy any more. It's simply happened too often. That, however, suggests a different problem: a pattern of American airplanes bombing and killing in Afghanistan. How many of these incidents, and how many civilian deaths, does it take in Afghanistan to constitute a war crime? Or in the Philippines? Or in Colombia, or in Somalia, or in Iraq, or ... you get the idea. The possibilities aren't endless, but it's getting to be that way.

Prosecution of those crimes wouldn't be "politically motivated," any more than prosecuting a serial killer is politically motivated. But the fact that the White House is using such terminology is also revealing. It wasn't too many months ago, in the wake of 9-11, that Bush and his minions were in front of the cameras asking, plaintively, "Why do they hate us?" Now comes explicit acknowledgement that it's not just fanatical Islamic extremists who hate us; for the ICC to prosecute someone from this country, an awful lot of people and their governments -- including such staunch allies as Britain and France -- would need to "hate us."