https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
> The Act gives the President power to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court".
I’m glad for The Hague Invasion Act.
am not well educated on it, for context
If you're going to propagate conspiracy theories, at least try to do so in such fashion as avoids making you look as if you can't be bothered to read.
And it isn't about the personnel being "above" anything. It's simply that the ICC is not a court and does not respect due process, so we do not subject American citizens to it (and indeed it would be an interesting Constitutional question as to whether that's even truly possible).
From a more pragmatic perspective, as long as Russia and China don't recognize the ICC's authority, it would be a major global strategic blunder to impose checks and balances only on the United States.
Of course there are other threads that bring up the possibility of treason. But I don’t see why there’s a need to explain the (obvious, right?) fact that the ICC wouldn’t prosecute treason.
> “If he was a "war criminal" as many here claim, why wasn't he ever prosecuted or convicted?”
Which, I guess I just meant, prosecuted by whom? He was the US government at the highest levels and there is no international body with jurisdiction. It doesn’t seem like nobody being able to press charges means a man is innocent.
If Kissinger committed treason, there was nothing stopping the US government from pursuing charges
Except the optics and power that his party holds (politics), which is what keeps many congress critters in positions of power. The power that the US wields (economically and militarily) kept the other countries at bay.
People pretending, that the reasons are unclear, are being disingenuous.
I'm not saying his legacy is positive or negative overall, but folks need to look at both sides of it. He's a great example of someone who had a major hand in a lot of major decisions and has a very very mixed legacy because of it.
Things are much blurrier than we make them out to be these days. Anyone who has a major impact often has significant positive and negative impacts. Kissinger was not a one sided character.
And with that said, I can't believe I just defended Henry Kissinger, but it's still worth saying...
The biggest problem is that what a lot of people know about Kissinger is "folk knowledge" they picked up from other people, and this gets passed down as a game of telephone until it's common knowledge, but no one has bothered to check if it's accurate or not. It doesn't help when there are articles like the Rolling Stones one that's been posted, which seem more interested in cherry-picking facts to fit the narrative then in actually looking at what happened with open eyes.
A few years ago, I thought to myself that since people talk about Kissinger so much, I should go and look at what he actually did. I was surprised to see that he didn't seem to be the driving force behind bad policy decisions in the Nixon White House. He was certainly involved as National Security Advisor, but most of the time it looked like Nixon would have made the same decisions without him. Yet for some reason, Kissinger is usually blamed much more than Nixon.
For instance, at least according to the State Department Historian[1] it was General Creighton Abrams that first suggested bombing enemy bases in Cambodia. Nixon agreed, and involved Kissinger, who was the National Security Advisor. But the bombing is usually presented as Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia. General Abrams isn't mentioned in the Rolling Stones article at all. Compare the Google results for "Creighton Abrams Cambodia" with "Henry Kissinger Cambodia" to see how slanted things are.
That's not even getting into the fact that blaming the Khmer Rouge on the bombing campaign is an extreme stretch. But that's how people approach the folk knowledge - they get told something is true, believe it to be true, then stitch together whatever facts they can find to support the narrative they've already set their mind on.
[1] https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/nixon/vi/64033.htm
The Nobel prize is based on explosives. Most scientists 100 years ago were eugenicists. It's difficult to judge people's beliefs and decisions outside of their era. That doesn't mean that you can't build a moral or ethical system outside of it, but they're all based on assumptions of what is good.
It's not like there weren't people calling out Kissinger contemporaneously, or even Lincoln (for his handling of the Dakota). It's more weird when people obliviously deny recent history or create hagiography upon their death.
But we somehow feel compelled to weigh war crimes that lead to the death and suffering of millions against other positive accomplishments as if one justifies the other. We're basically conceding to Kissinger yet again by evaluating his legacy in terms of realpolitik.
Kissinger himself said many times that relations between states aren't based on morality, so people who act in the name of states can't be bound by international laws. It's an idea that is the basis of the realist philosophy. A lot of people in the the foreign policy establishment share that view.
The USA for example supports the International criminal court, but not for its citizens, so Kissinger can never be prosecuted like Milošević. Those who say the ICC is just an instrument of power are not entirely wrong.
I’d say exactly the same if I were a war criminal
Kissinger is directly responsible for feeding South Vietnam to communists, and delivering its 20 million people into slavery.