How interesting that the International Criminal Court has chosen to issue an arrest warrant of dubious legality against Russian President Vladimir Putin on charges of war crimes within days of the twentieth anniversary of the US-led invasion and subsequent multi-year occupation of Iraq. One might be tempted to extend a little sympathy in the direction of the ICC had the ICC or, for that matter, any other international body of justice issued any charges, any due process, any punishment of those who had pushed for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, on totally false pretext in the fabrication of which practically the entire institutional governing structure and practically all western mainstream media participated, subjecting Iraq to continous misery, greater even than the misery inflicted upon it, again by the west,following the west’s first invasion of Iraq in 1991. The pretext was ludicrous in itself, given the ferocity with which the west had continued to bomb Iraq between 1991 and 2003, and the general disablement of Iraq as a result of western sanctions (including the deaths of half a million children), so that weapons experts knew before 2003 that there was no possibility that Iraq possessed the means either for nuclear or for chemical weapons.The evidence that was advanced in support was disproven either immediately or later, including all the evidence presented by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations (an episode for which Power later expressed great shame). There was no evidence of motivation and indirect attempts to link Hussein with Al Qaeda were clearly a sham.
We could go back further of course to the invasion in 2001 (long before anything corresponding to formal investigation had even been initiated, let alone completed) and two decade occupation of Afghanistan, and then move ahead in time to the recent history of western interventionism to include such instances as its provocative meddling that pushed Georgia into war with Russia in 2007, destruction of the sovereign country of Libya in 2011, the tortuous attempt to destroy the sovereign country of Syria from 2011 onwards, US inspired support of color revolutions or attempted color revolutions in countries such as Ukraine, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia and numerous other interventions, violent and other, across the globe. The corresponding decline in global trust in the US and the weakening of US hegemony has been manifest by luckwarm UN Assembly support for anti-Russian resolutions, and the unwillingness of the UN to defer the question of Russian war crimes to the ICC.
The jurisdiction of the ICC is not recognized by the US, China or Russia, and it is only partially recognized by Ukraine. It is powerless to investigate war crimes committed by the US (and were they to try the judges might expect severe censure from the US). Lobbying from Kiev and London has doubtless scored a minor optics success in achieving an arrest warrant against Putin, while at the same bringing the ICC into further disrepute in the eyes of the Global South (the development with Putin reminding the world of the tortuous behavior of the ICC in the matter of smearing Slobadan Milosovic and ICC’s weaponization of the proceedins in a manner that further served to obscure the illegal western-aided break-up of Yugoslavia). It has tainted the entire credibility of the global network of international regulatory institutions which, on the whole, but with exceptions, appears brainwashed by the machinations of the Washington consensus and neocon ideology.
The warrant has no practical meaning, especially in the absence of similar energy being exerted against western war crimes, which as we have seen, is very long (not to mention US use of nuclear weapons in 1945, the many subsequent times that US administrations have considered the use of nuclear weapons, and the general horrors of European and US genocidal histories of colonialism). The ICC probably lacks authority to issue a warrant against the president of a State that has refused to accept its juridiction. It might have had some more credible basis to go on had the matters on which it proposes to adjudicate been considered in advance by properly constituted national and regional courts, and had the substance of some of the alleged war crimes been subject to far more rigorous investation: this would include the matter of the transportation of children from war zones which include areas whose legitimacy is contested: Ukraine claiming that the Donbass republics are part of Ukraine, Russia claiming that they are part of Russia.
The ICC has been politicized in a way that simply undermines its authority to do anything with conviction. It joins a formidable club, including, at various times, the work of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and that of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The international regulatory order, in other words, is in the initial stages of decay, and requires a form of re-energization that wholeheartedly accepts multipolarity as the appropriate framework of international decision-taking and embraces the development of an entirely new framework, one that is no longer western dominated nor western centered.
I had a dream years ago that Bush was arrested for war crimes, after stepping off a plane in France. I felt a dead sinking in my heart upon waking from that dream and realizing it had not actually happened.
It’s proof of the absolute decay of western civilization and its pretense of upholding a banner of integrity and justice that not only are Bush and Cheney free, but that supposed intellectuals allow the dim, comical spectre of Trump’s purported evil to cause them nostalgia for the criminal regime of those despots.