Anyway, The bill didn't specify the means, so the means are a part of policy. Sanctioning these type of individuals is a bully move. This administration has picked a strategy of being a bully.
What is fascinating is that the US itself is dismantling it, ultimately leading to a world that is no longer US-led and where the US is a lot poorer.
If you review George H W Bush's early 90s speeches, he was cryctal clear that "UN" would be the center of "a new world order" and not USA or Washington DC. The undeclared attack of 9/11 necessitated a change in the plans. (If you think US was attempting to "Shock and Awe" Iraqis, that is fine, but we would disagree on that ..)
p.s. http://canadianliberty.com/new-world-order-speeches-of-presi...
Trump didn't show any strong ideological positions, it's not like there's a straight line running through 40 years. Trump is a wild card. You might argue that having a President that might do anything and everything in office is weakening the US, and that therefore strengthens other powers, but I'm skeptical that they're fine with "oh yeah, well, there's a 30 percent chance he watches an unfavorible documentary on Russia and goes into all-out Cold War mode".
I don't think Trump is too predictable beyond a) Trump wants what's good for Trump and b) Trump will do what American corporations and the generic establishment wants (aka strong military, only favorable trade deals, no international cooperations that might lead to having to change behavior the US profit from). That's essentially rolling the dice. You might win a car, you might lose your life. How many leaders of aspiring or former world powers are going to roll that dice?
It's useful if it pushes the US away from Europe and weakens its sphere of influence, which is exactly what happened.
Rolling the dice is great, you can win big (or bigly?), but it's a dice. Unless you've manipulated it and made sure it can only show whatever side you want, there's a good chance you'll lose.
I mean, I personally predicted in mid-2016 that if Trump were elected, he would push isolationist policies. That was pretty obvious to me and pretty much everyone I'd talked to at the time, and if I could see that, I'm sure the Chinese and Russian governments could have predicted that.
And no, it probably hasn't turned out exactly as either of them potentially could have wanted, but it's not bad. The US has drifted from Europe, and has reduced its presence in military engagements where Russia has gained influence. China has possibly been hurt by the trade war, but it's hurt the US as well, likely just as much. I think Trump really wants to hurt China (which, in our hypothetical scenario, would have been a miscalculation on China's part), but I don't think he's competent enough to do so without inflicting harm on the US as well.
Russia isn't in a position of power. Any amount of generated chaos is a positive - the proxy war in the middle east is irrelevant to Europe - Putin would make that trade any day of the week.
Russia isn't directly supporting only Trump - it's likely they are supporting left wing candidates as well. It isn't for "policy" it's for division and sowing chaos. The US is its own worst enemy right now - and that limits it internationally.
> Any amount of generated chaos is a positive - the proxy war in the middle east is irrelevant to Europe - Putin would make that trade any day of the week.
And lose their Mediterranean naval base (the only one they have that's not in or right next to Russia, depending on how you view Crimea) and their influence in the region? Hard to believe, especially for a guy like Putin that strikes me as chess player rather than an emotional brawler without long-term plans.
Sowing chaos is what I meant: rolling the dice. Might turn out great, might be your downfall. Doesn't sound like a KGB agent to me.
You're arguing with yourself. You assume that he is either controlled or not - but you never consider the fact that they may be allies.
No he wasn't. He went after journalists in the most vicious way since Nixon. His intelligence services violated privacy in the US on a scale never seen before in the country. He attempted to invade Syria and de facto ended up doing exactly that, starting new wars across the Middle East. He didn't do a damn thing different, he was just another President in the White House committing new atrocities, like the guy before him. Then on the way out the door he sent the FBI after his replacement, in a pre-staged attempted coup. Dirty as can be.
People try to pretty up the Obama Administration years, because he's a fan favorite. I get it, he's a lot more likable than Bush or Trump; he's more composed, smoother, and smarter. It's all a con, all the way down to the fraudulent Nobel Peace Prize he apparently got ahead of time for destroying Syria and Libya. His Presidency was a travesty filled with many acts of extraordinary evil. There should have been a Syria death counter every night on CNN, but the left didn't have the integrity to do it to one of their own.
Your type of delusional perfectionism will deter any leader who tries to follow your moral compass while keeping in touch with reality. We will be left only with assholes in charge, because they don't give a fuck what you think.
Thank you very much for that great phrase to describe so much of politics today 'delusional perfectionism', and which might explain a lot of the aggressive antagonism towards the media from US and UK today (and probably others).
>We will be left only with assholes in charge, because they don't give a fuck what you think.
Which I think perfectly describes Trump, and to a large degree Johnson in the UK, but also Modi on India and Erdogan who have moved themselves out of the way of all criticism.
I am not sure how he destroyed Syria. The whole resistance was part of the Arab Spring. It was a mixture of unhappiness with the dictatorship and the food scarcity outside of the cities. The involvement from outside powers came in very late and mostly were half hearted approaches (except the Russians).
Obama is not perfect, and during his reign, journalism and whistleblowers were affected a lot. He also had other issues but these were not part of them.
You got it all backward comrade. Libya was just fine before France and the US intervened. Sure the infrastructure and liberties were not there, but that's kinda the theme of the region.
Actually Libya was going on a "revolution" as Gaddafi was delegating his powers to his son who was interested in liberalizing the economy , building infrastructure and giving people more freedom.
It all went downhill and now it's a hotbed for ISIS and friends.
Here is a link to the civil war (Arab spring) before the involvement of other countries. I can find more if needed.
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/04/happening...
I know because I live in Tunisia and the previous president did authorize moving arms to rebels through the country.
Don't even try not to own up to that fact. Everyone who has been counting the piles of smoking rubble the US and its allies leave around the place, know just how much nicer things were before Americans decided to drop bombs on people they think the world doesn't care about.
The direct, immediate consequences (that is: the current state) have to be attributed to the intervention. Some consider the belief "hey, we'll just bomb it and everybody will love each other and it'll be great" naivete bordering on retardation, but I think "we really didn't know any better" has to be ruled out after repeated use. At some point even a toddler learns not to put their hand on the hot stove, unless pain is their goal.
> On 19 February, several days after the conflict began, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi announced the creation of a commission of inquiry into the violence, chaired by a Libyan judge, as reported on state television. He stated that the commission was intended to be "for members of Libyan and foreign organizations of human rights" and that it will "investigate the circumstances and events that have caused many victims."[137] Caricature of Gaddafi, Al Bayda, April 2011
> Towards the end of February, it was reported that the Gaddafi government had suppressed protests in Tripoli by distributing automobiles, money and weapons for hired followers to drive around Tripoli and attack people showing signs of dissent.[182] In Tripoli, "death squads" of mercenaries and Revolutionary Committees members reportedly patrolled the streets and shot people who tried to take the dead off the streets or gather in groups.[183] The International Federation for Human Rights concluded on 24 February that Gaddafi was implementing a scorched earth strategy. The organization stated that "It is reasonable to fear that he has, in fact, decided to largely eliminate, wherever he still can, Libyan citizens who stood up against his regime and furthermore, to systematically and indiscriminately repress civilians. These acts can be characterized as crimes against humanity, as defined in Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court."[184]
> In May 2011, International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo estimated that 500–700 people were killed by security forces in February 2011, before the rebels took up arms. According to Moreno-Ocampo, "shooting at protesters was systematic".[185]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_Civil_War_(2011)
This was getting worse before NATO tried to intervene.
If you want to know what happens when the world does not interfere, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_killing_of_Bengali_intell...
> Deaths 1,111
That's kind of the point. Was Gaddhafi a great guy? I don't think so. Was he in control? Yeah. Was Libya, and, by extension, the region stable with him in control? Yeah. Did we destabilize the region and create the circumstances for ISIS to flourish, open chattel slavery etc? Yeah. Was that predictable? Yeah, very much so.
I tend to see dictators like Gaddhafi more like a necessary evil. Kind of like an amputation to save the whole. Yes, it sucks losing your foot. But losing your life sucks a whole lot more. The NATO approach is ostensibly "we can't accept this patient losing a foot, and if the patient dies, then so be it, at least we tried to to do the right thing™".
It rarely works, and at some point I question whether the stated goal is really the intention or the -often witnessed- side-effects of regional destabilization, endless civil wars etc are the actual intended effect. That would change two things: a) the missions would be successful, explaining why we're repeating them with the same play book time and time again and b) we don't have to assume that the tens of thousands of analysts we're paying to analyze things and make smart plans are imbeciles, incapable of learning from the past.
Hoover and Nixon committed worse privacy violations than Obama. Also, he never tried to invade Syria. And he didn't send the FBI after Trump, presidents don't have that authority.
The Republican administration pre-Trump appeared to be on a mission to glass 2 countries and entirely spirited at the thought of gearing up and invading of Iran. It was so terrible that the Obama Administration's foreign policy, which had a lot of problems, looked pretty good by comparison.
I'm not sure where the "international cooperation not based on power and submission" business the thread root was talking about, but speaking as a foreigner I would encourage US administrations to stick to bullying, this is the good end of the spectrum of US foreign policy. 2000-2010 wasn't that long ago.
It's as much politics on the ICC side as on the USA side.
For years, the ICC had only prosecuted former warlords from African countries. Only the loosing sides, the criminals that won national power were usually ignored, as the recent Ivory Coast shows. So some African leaders protested and even removed their country from the ICC. So the court had to react, at least to show an intention even if a real prosecution is totally unrealistic. So the ICC Prosecutor — which is the former Ministry of Justice of the Gambia dictator — launched inquiries about crimes by security forces of Myanmar (Birmania), Israel, USA… It's mostly a symbolic gesture.
It'd still take extraordinary effort to persuade (shame) prosecution to take action. But with some transparency, at least the torrent of evil stuff would be recorded by someone somewhere.
And how about something a bit more formal? Maybe modeled after police department citizen review board? With a staff to injest, process, and interpret stuff? Like Project Censored.
I half thought that maybe Wikileaks might do some of this. And I should have probably scouted a bit before asking for something that already exists. (I hadn't actually ever visited the site before. I've never been terribly eager to get myself added to some watch lists.)
Alas.
https://search.wikileaks.org/?q=war+crimes
Not much value add there. It really is just a fancy FTP site with a search engine. The org itself does some competent press releases, swag, and branding; that ain't nothing.
Under this philosophy (or doctrine, if you will) of sovereignty, US will never accept that the ICC - an entity that the US citizens have not explicitly delegated their sovereign power to - are trying to prosecute US nationals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_sovereignty_in_the_Uni...
How so?
If you visit a foreign country, you are making an explicit choice to enter their jurisdiction.
If you are extradited from the US, it means the government (your representatives) explicitly chose to cooperate with another jurisdiction in some manner.
The current case is somewhat confusing to me. The US doesn't participate in the ICC. The matter to be investigated apparently occurred in a country that does participate though. But the suspects were part of an active military operation. Unlike a tourist, it doesn't really seem like armed forces are usually subject to the laws of a jurisdiction they might "visit" during combat (typically quite the opposite in fact).
If someone from outside your jurisdiction threatens your citizens, isn't any capable government supposed to take actions to protect them? To me, the real question here is why the US isn't part of an international effort to prevent war crimes.
That's not the part that's confusing to me. (I'm really not clear how you could possibly come away with that from what I wrote?)
The confusing part is the jurisdiction. In what capacity were the soldiers present in the other country? (It obviously wasn't voluntarily for leisure.) Based on the answer to the former, were they subject to the laws of the other jurisdiction at the time of their actions? Or do they instead fall under US jurisdiction? The US government's stance on this seems quite clear at least.
Current US government's stance is that war crimes by US soldiers are good celebration worthy thing.
US army itself is actually better then what that implies and does not have soldiers on the loose. But, we are talking about government here.
The worst of the worst war crimes will be prosecuted in the US as well, but generally, soldiers have little to fear. A non-US court wouldn't have the same perspective.
Essentially: if you want people to do whatever it takes to get your mission done, make sure they're not liable for anything they break while doing so. That goes for the military as much as for tech companies. Tech companies just don't have armies to back up their stances, yet.
That is the point of the ICC in the first place: you cannot trust the war criminals to bring justice to their society.
We might be able to trust countries to judge their soldiers' behavior when these soldiers act on their own. The problem, and the reason, I believe, why the US won't voluntarily accept the ICC is when they don't, e.g. when drone operators bomb a wedding reception, because it's not going to be those individual operators on the hook - it's the mission and the larger policy that are going to be implicated. And a military doesn't want their officers to ask themselves "wait, can I do this? Will I be prosecuted for this?" when told to do something, they want them to say "Sir, yes, Sir" and mean it.
And were they brought to justice and sentenced for their crimes? No. A sham trial isn't sufficient for war crimes.
That being said, I don't like when this kind of issues are politicized ("Obama destroyed America", "Trump sucks on all issues", ...). So I looked up the numbers.
The US congress and senate passed a law, in 2002, that gave the president authority to "with all means necessary, prohibit the International Criminal Court from seeking to exercise jurisdiction over United States persons, and allied persons"
https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2002328
Votes by party
Republican YEAS: 201 NAYS: 18
Democratic YEAS: 195 NAYS: 13
Doesn't seem to be a "current administration" issue only. Clearly the US was caught up in the post-9/11 panic at the time of passing this law. But it seems a good idea to repeal it - if there is no longer a majority in support of it.